Outlook Rule precedence when it comes to spam trapping

[britechguy]

I recently mentioned that I know quite a few users of Outlook (installed, not .com) that are having messages from subscription email lists being spam trapped and it appears to be Outlook that's doing it.

I really can't understand what's going on, particularly since I have had several people check when they have focus on a message in their inbox that Outlook does not even have spam filtering on (ALT + H, J, O - Home Ribbon, Junk, Junk options. The Options tab has the radio button for no automatic filtering selected.) And there does not seem to be any real rhyme or reason as to which messages are being spam trapped when they arrive. I've also had the users check that their own email service providers are not spam trapping these messages before they even arrive, and so far the answer is, "No, they're not spam trapping."

I have tried the safe senders and safe recipients lists for the domain groups.io. No dice. Still spam trapping certain messages.

Now I've moved on to using an Outlook rule that checks if "groups.io" is anywhere in the message header and moves the message to Inbox if that's the case.

What I don't know is whether a user defined rule falls in the screening hierarchy such that it has the "uppermost hand" and will undo any marking as spam that Outlook might have done. There is no specific action not to mark a message as spam/junk, but I would have to believe that intentionally moving a message to Inbox or any other folder if it passes the rule test would automatically de-spam-mark it.

Can anyone confirm or refute whether that presumption that a user defined rule has the highest precedence is true or not?

 

[britechguy]

By the way, here is an "anonymized" email header where Outlook sent the message to Junk even after employing a rule that says if the message has "groups.io" in the message header it should be sent to inbox. I cannot for the life of me understand why, because it does have "groups.io" in multiple locations in the message header.

It really peeves me that we've reached a point where messages from a subscription service, any subscription service, that can be verified as such can get spam trapped. You can't get these unless you subscribe to a mailing list. By definition, that cannot be spam because you do not get it unless you ask for it and it should be trivially simple to avoid spam trapping it. (I notice that there is a line in the header, color highlighted in red by me, that has "spam" in it, but I'm not quite sure that's meaningful based on other parts of the header. These email intricacies are just not my thing.)

It seems to me that somewhere along the way that Comcast (Xfinity) has tagged the message as spam, but it doesn't tag most messages from groups.io as spam.
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[NJW]

I'd suggest that it would be better to stop Comcast from marking it as Spam in the first place. Isn't there a web interface that can be used to manage the Comcast mail? Add a rule there to allow groups.io (or remove any block rule, of course).

Is there any facility in the Comcast mail settings to automatically train spam filters (for that account) according to what's in the spam folder? Alternatively, switch off the Comcast spam filter and deal with it all in Outlook filter rules (especially if the Comcast spam status flag is still set).

 

[nlinecomputers]

I'd suggest that it would be better to stop Comcast from marking it as Spam in the first place. Isn't there a web interface that can be used to manage the Comcast mail? Add a rule there to allow groups.io (or remove any block rule, of course).

Is there any facility in the Comcast mail settings to automatically train spam filters (for that account) according to what's in the spam folder? Alternatively, switch off the Comcast spam filter and deal with it all in Outlook filter rules (especially if the Comcast spam status flag is still set).

This. Outlook is functioning properly.

 

[britechguy]

Well, I am still working with the user, but he says he's not only called Comcast but also checked what he can as far as "not marking as spam" via the webmail interface.

We are, essentially, doing the "deal with it all in Outlook" approach because of all the weird complications that seem to be appearing these days when it comes to spam trapping. Gmail has an option in its webmail interface that has as the action "never mark as spam" and I wish to heaven that this were available, in that straightforward form, in Outlook as well.

When it comes to emailing lists, which are still "the favorite way of group communication" in the blind and visually-impaired community, there seems to be a lot of inappropriate tagging of messages as spam by various email service providers. You can report, and report, and report to them that anything originating from {insert domain here} is coming from a subscription email list service and should never be marked as spam, but they still mark it as spam.

It should be dirt simple for the email service providers to verify that a given email list service exists and to whitelist absolutely anything that originates from it. It can't be spam under any normal circumstance (that is, no one has done some creative hacking) because the only way one can receive a message from these services is if one subscribed, and these days you can't really "subscribe by accident" at all easily.

The addition of an Outlook rule saying that if "groups.io" appears in the message header move the message to Inbox is working very well indeed, but is still not 100% effective in de-spam-trapping messages incorrectly identified as spam (and it is rerouting quite a few that have been).

 

[nlinecomputers]

Turn off outlook spam filters. https://www.technipages.com/how-to-turn-off-outlooks-junk-email-filter

 

[britechguy]

Turn off outlook spam filters. https://www.technipages.com/how-to-turn-off-outlooks-junk-email-filter

In my original message: "Outlook does not even have spam filtering on (ALT + H, J, O - Home Ribbon, Junk, Junk options. The Options tab has the radio button for no automatic filtering selected.)"

That was the very first thing I checked, and it makes not one iota of difference. Which, in my opinion, is insane. When that's chosen I'd expect nothing to go to spam "through the hand of Outlook" and a number of the message headers I've checked are not like the one I posted, and point directly to the "hand of Outlook" being involved and being involved even when that setting is set to "do nothing."

Addendum: Even the linked article contains this warning, which is what I'm dealing with right now, but in Outlook itself, not Outlook.com. The issue applies to Outlook, installed Outlook, as well:

Outlook’s Perfectly Imperfect Junk Filters​

Unfortunately, many users reported that changing the junk email settings on the desktop app doesn’t affect the spam filtering level on Outlook.com. In other words, even if you set the filter to “No automatic filtering,” some emails will still land in the junk folder.

The worst part is that even if you manually mark emails as “Not junk,” the web app continues to send future messages from the same senders to the Junk folder.

As a result, many users complained that Microsoft is forcing its spam filters on them by not allowing users to disable the junk filters on Outlook.com. Some users decided to switch to a different email client for this reason alone.