I’m hitting a little bit of a theme with my posts. Can you tell it’s that time of the week when I go through my spam filters and check for false positives? That’s what I’m doing and I’m reminded of something that to me is extremely easy to identify. I’m not sure why messages fitting this scenario aren’t immediately flagged as spam and never seen by the user.

I don’t know how many times I’ve gone into my email and noticed messages with a weird date and time. In my opinion if an email is sent to me with a "Sent On" date prior to the Pony Express being in service, it’s more than likely a spam email. Even if it’s a legitimate email from a reliable source, I probably don’t want to see it. When they realize I’m not getting their emails or responding, then we can talk about fixing their time server on their computers.

The same would be true for any date where "Sent On" is in the future of the current date. To me those are obvious issues and could be deleted at the server level. Anyone else agree with me here?

I know you can’t clump emails sent in the wee hours of the morning as always spam, I believe they are frequently from senders you may not want to see. Perhaps these could immediately be tagged as junk and kept for review. In fact, I think some email servers already do this as a first level trigger of potential spam sources.

I manage a number of email addresses on a daily basis. Some of the servers have great spam checking filters while others get legitimate emails caught in the filters by mistake on a regular basis. Regardless of the filters I setup or whitelist and blacklists I edit and update, I find myself scanning my junk mail folder for some services at least weekly.

I will regularly sort my Junk Mail folders by "Subject" which for me makes it very easy to scan through subject lines that are usually very similar and the only difference is the spoofed email address they’ve created from the "From" line.

It can depend on your personal preference, sorting by "From" can also be helpful sometimes, especially if you’re looking for a specific address that always seems to get a false positive identification as spam.

Both of these options work far better for me than the default sorting method of "Date".

Not sure if you’ve noticed it or not, but Outlook isn’t the most reliable engine for rendering accurate HTML display in your emails. Microsoft Outlook uses the Microsoft Word rendering engine to both create and display HTML in your emails. It’s for this reason that many people believe that Outlook is seriously broken and they’ve started a campaign to fix it.

If you’ve ever done any web development, you’ve probably realized that HTML that’s created by Microsoft Word and the old Microsoft Frontpage application was loaded with a lot of junk.

The folks behind fixoutlook.org are hoping that Microsoft will take the opportunity coming with Office 2010 to step away from the Microsoft Word rendering engine from being used for HTML rendering in Outlook.

Microsoft has stated that they don’t believe Outlook is broken and they will continue to use Word because there are no agreeable standards in how HTML code is to be rendered for email.

What do you think? Is HTML in Outlook broken?

Gmail seems to continue to be the webmail application to beat. If you’re using Gmail over the other popular webmail tools like Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail/Windows Live Mail, are you using it to its fullest potential?

You can go to the Gmail Help files and read through a variety of tips to make you a ninja of Gmail usage. The tips are divided into the four different levels.

1. White belt
2. Green belt
3. Black belt
4. Gmail master

Through each section they have pretty much covered just about any other tip I can think of for how I use it. Many of the tips involve using features that are available from the Google Labs functionality. There are a number of nice additions you can incorporate into Gmail to improve and enhance the functionality.

What tips do you have that you’d like to share? I do still wish I could sort by subject and other columns in Gmail.

I received an email the other day that was a very good spoof and knock-off email that’s entire purpose was for phishing and dropping off a trojan horse application in its payload. The question is whether or not you’re paying attention close enough to have seen it.

Outlook 2007 does a good job of letting you know when you receive emails that look suspicious. Here’s a couple of things I immediately look for in a seemingly weird or unexpected email.

1.) Is there an attachment? Anytime I receive an email with an attachment I’m always leery of the file. Even if it’s from someone I know. If I didn’t expect it, I usually don’t ever open it.

2.) Be aware of patterns. Does the "sender" normally contact you by email? Do they ever send you a file via email? In the case of the email above from Microsoft, Microsoft wouldn’t email you a file, they almost exclusively provide files for download from their website specifically.

3.) Look for actual link targets in email. Any links in the body of the message, hover over it and look at the tooltip or status bar to see where the link is really pointing. In my opinion, if it’s to an IP address or an uncommon domain name or top level domain, don’t click the link!

That’s my trio of email triage questions I work through with suspicious emails. They’ve protected me for quite some time. Hopefully they’ll be helpful to you as well.

Image: screenshot of email received in Outlook 2007

I’ve been using Plaxo for awhile now and one of the features I liked about it was a custom signature that it would build for you inside of your Outlook application. Did you know that with Outlook 2007 you can create your own business card type signature?

It’s very easy to create a signature file within Outlook 2007 that you can append to any of your messages automatically or as needed when you desire.

From my example above I created a quick one to be used as a basic business response email whenever I respond back to someone. I could also create one for my personal email address too.

The key is to just have a contact card added in your address book with the information you want to use in the signature.

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I’ve had some recent changes to my computer system that I had shared about recently in posts and thought I’d provide a little update on the matter. One of the issues was with Gmail not displaying images in messages, even though I’d told it to, and Xobni having a new release version available.

I wrote awhile back about Gmail not displaying images in my email messages, even though I’d told it to specifically always do so from specific senders. I had written this back in November of 2008 and up until now had continued to have issues. Recently I noticed that I was once again seeing graphics and now I don’t believe I’ve been having anymore issues. There was talk in the comments on the original post that it could be due to some Google Labs issues, but I never was able to confirm or fix anything there. Is everyone else noticing images again? Any ideas of what it was?

Also I’ve been a huge fan of Xobni since I first found out about it. I think it adds some great tools and features to Outlook that don’t exist. They continue to develop and improve the tool and expand the features. My problem though is it still brings my machine to a sluggish pace that’s just not acceptable. Honestly, part of the problem is probably with my machine. Pushing 4 years old and I put it through the wringer in my daily use. I uninstalled Xobni from my laptop, but when I get a new machine, Xobni will be one of the apps I’ll immediately reinstall and give it a try again.

I’m not sure what gave me the idea to do this but it was interesting the way it turned out. I’ve been tweaking our spam filtering settings for our domains for work and was a bit in awe of the collection of blacklisted words we had collected for our spam traps.

My first thought was to share my list of blocked words with everyone, but I wasn’t sure the best way to share it, so I have the way I’ve embedded it below as code will allow you to hopefully cut and paste it into your own filters. This will let you hit the ground running with some spam traps.

Then I had the idea to paste all the words into Wordle and see what the look of spam words came across as on their site. You see the word art from Wordle above.

Just continue reading to see the code to let you copy and paste the word list. I’m hoping it doesn’t get the page or site blocked because of all the spam words that are in the text. I’m hoping embedding it into the code like this will help. Careful some of the words included are pretty coarse. If you’re not interested don’t click through the read more link.

Image: Picture from Wordle.net

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I received an email today that was a phishing scam using the popular online payment website, PayPal. My Outlook client caught it as Junk Mail, but I thought it would be a good opportunity to show people how a legitimate “looking” email can really lead you to places you don’t want to go.

As you can see from the image above which is a screen capture from my email Inbox, everything looks normal and appropriate and legitimate right? However, if you hover your mouse over the links you’ll see that the link is actually going to direct you to a bogus website that’s been setup to collect your information. I’m sure if you went to the site (which I don’t recommend and which is why I’m not even typing the URL you’ll see) it would look just like the PayPal website too.

If you look at the code behind the email in your Inbox, which Outlook automatically displays for Junk Mail, we can see in the image below the bogus links much more clearly.

The lesson here is that before you go clicking on links in emails. Take a minute to hover over them before clicking and just make sure they’re going to take you to the place you’re expecting to go. Otherwise, you’ll end up in a place where you really don’t want to be.

I spent today at a productivity summit that talked about a variety of ways to increase productivity both personally and in your company as a whole. The first session discussed “Managing Email Productivity”. One of the methods shared was to reverse the composition of your email messages.

Reverse Your Email Composition Sequence

In the standard model we normally write emails in this order.

1. Input recipients
2. Write subject
3. Write body of message
4. Attach files

Robby Slaughter, the presenter of the summit shared his preferred method of reversing this process flow and the reasons behind each. I’m significantly paraphrasing but this is the basic premise.

1. Attach files - how many times have you sent an email and forgotten to attach the files? Attaching the files first also reinforces the purpose of the email which will be important in the following steps.
2. Write Body - The body of the message in this case with attached files should be a simple statement of what action you would like the recipient to take on the attached files. Should they review them, are they to be printed for the upcoming seminar? State specifically what you want the reader to do in your email.
3. Write Subject - Write the subject after the body because it should be a simple, stripped-down restatement of the body of the message. Clear and concise with key words at the beginning of the subject.
4. Select Recipients - Choosing the recipients last performs a couple of helpful functions. First, if an email doesn’t have a recipient specified, you can’t accidentally send the email without the attachments or pausing long enough to make sure you actually want to hit “Send” on that email laced with your frustrations. Secondly, if you wait till the end you can further clarify exactly who needs to be included based on the actions and requested tasks specified in the email.

What processes do you use to stay on top of your email or to more effectively manage your email productivity?