To help reduce the amount of spam email arriving in your Office 365 Inbox, we are changing our spam filter settings.
What’s happening?
Every message arriving on our mail servers is subject to spam filtering. Office 365 assigns a confidence threshold level, based on the likelihood that the message is spam. Any message assigned High confidence spam (i.e. considered certain spam) is automatically sent straight to your Junk Email folder.
From today, any message assigned Spam (i.e. considered suspected spam) will also be sent straight to your Junk Email folder.
How does this affect you?
The good news is that you should see less spam in your Inbox.
However, email filtering is not an exact science and it is not always possible to distinguish between valid and unsolicited mail; after all, one person’s spam could be another person’s legitimate correspondence. This is why:
- Valid emails are sometimes rejected and sent to your Junk Email folder (false positives).
- Spam sometimes makes it through to your Inbox (false negatives).
So what should you do?
It’s still important to check your Junk Email folder regularly for legitimate messages that may have been incorrectly identified as spam.
By default, Office 365’s Junk Email folder is located towards the bottom of your mail folders. This means it can be easily overlooked, particularly if you have a lot of mail folders. You may like to add the Junk Email folder to your Favorites so that it appears at the top of your folder list – making it easier for you to monitor. Simply right-click on the Junk Email folder and select Show in Favorites from the pop-up menu.