In a time when billions of emails are sent and received every day, there’s no denying the fact that our world has become incredibly reliant upon email.
Consider the fact that the average business employee sends and receives 121 work-related emails every day, according to a 2014 survey. That flood of information not only feels overwhelming; it can actually have a negative impact on productivity.
One way to cope with email overload is to refine your company’s Outlook junk email filter, with the goal of redirecting unwanted emails away from your inbox. Here are a few ways to get started:
1. Tweak the strength of your junk email filter.
If too much spam is making its way to your inbox, you might start by upping the strength of your email filter. (You can do this on individual PCs, or you can set a company-wide filter level.) Outlook gives you four built-in options for email filtering:
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No automatic filtering: Every message sent your way—no matter how spammy—will land in your inbox.
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Low level: This is the default Outlook setting. It moves suspected spam to your junk folder based on things like the sender’s email address and content of the message.
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High level: Stricter filtering blocks a broader swath of emails. If you use high-level email filtering, Microsoft recommends you check your junk folder regularly for mislabeled legitimate emails.
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Safe lists only: You’ll only receive mail from senders you manually add to a whitelist.
These four areas should be the first place you look when it’s time to adjust your Outlook junk email filters.
2. Auto-delete unwanted emails.
Of course, in many organizations, spam folders don’t cut it. There’s still a risk that an employee will be browsing through their junk folder and click on something that opens the door for a company-wide virus. That’s why many businesses choose to delete messages entirely, rather than moving them a junk email folder. This option leads to fewer spam messages, but it also carries the very real risk of overzealous filtering.
3. Get professional help.
Although the two options above can help to keep your inbox more manageable, simply adopting stricter filters or auto-deleting messages both increase the risk that you might begin missing important, relevant emails. Wouldn’t it be great if instead your email could just be smarter?
With Outlook’s junk email filter making the decisions, you never know which messages you’ll get and which ones you’ll miss. Consider an email filtering service that helps to keep your inbox clean by applying an intelligent verification process to all incoming messages. Only about 13 percent of email from outside your company comes from a real person. Some of it is unwanted junk (which you never signed up for), and some of it is wanted junk (like a 50-percent off coupon at your favorite online store).
Here’s how a different solution can help: When employees receive a message from a sender who is outside your known email community, the sender receives a request (or challenge) to verify their email address. If the sender confirms that he or she is a person, the email goes to your inbox. If not, the email is sent to a junk mail queue. This challenge-response system weeds out the spambots from living, breathing senders to ensure you’re not getting overwhelmed with junk. This way, employees only receive important emails and cut out the clutter of an overloaded inbox.
Ready to refine your company’s Outlook junk email filter in a way that actually benefits your inbox? Add Sendio’s Opt-Inbox™ to your company’s email filtering to make email relevant again.