Junk Mail Notification Envelope

[Will]

Our company uses Outlooks built-in junk email filtering. We find it does
quite a nice job. The problem is this; when junk email comes in and is
places in the Junk Mail folder, Outlook still pops up the new mail envelope
in the notification area. This causes someone working away at their
workstation to check their mail, only to find there is no new "real" mail,
just a junk email or two. Throughout the course of the workday, this can
waste a lot of productivity.

How can one make Outlook not pop up that little notification envelope near
the clock when the only new message arrivals are Junk? Outlook recognizes
them as junk already (hence it put them in the Junk folder) so you would
think it would be trivial to stop the envelope.

What I have tried so far are VBA macros. I set a macro to immediately mark
anything incoming in the Junk Mail folder as "read". Unfortunately this did
not remove the notification area envelope.

Is their an event I can tap into for that notification area envelope that
will check if there are any unread messages in the inbox, and if not, remove
the envelope? Or is there some option I have just not found yet to enable
this functionality?

It doesn't seem to make sense. Why would one want to be notified every time
a junk message appears? Most would rather sift through the junk at the end
of the day looking for any false positives then just delete them all in one
fell swoop instead of every time a new one arrives.

Thank you.

 

[Brian Tillman]

How can one make Outlook not pop up that little notification envelope
near the clock when the only new message arrivals are Junk? Outlook
recognizes them as junk already (hence it put them in the Junk
folder) so you would think it would be trivial to stop the envelope.

You may think it might be trivial, but if it were, the developers would
probably have done it already. Displaying new mail icon is a process that
runs independently of the other processes that initiate at mail receiption
time, such as the Junk E-mail filter and the rules engine (although rules
always run after the Junk E-mail filter). The process that displays the
icon has no idea whether or not the Junk E-mail filter will do anything with
the message. How would you feel if three messages arrived, the Junk E-mail
filter processed them, moved the first of the three, then turned off the
icon because it moved a message? Now you'd have two legitimate messages and
no notice that any has arrived. The two actions don't depend on each other.

 

[Will]

How would you feel if three messages arrived, the Junk E-mail
filter processed them, moved the first of the three, then turned off the
icon because it moved a message? Now you'd have two legitimate messages and
no notice that any has arrived. The two actions don't depend on each other.

Understood. I am a programmer myself and can grasp the system that is in
place you speak of. However, I wouldn't write code that would remove the
notification envelope when an incoming message was moved to the Junk Mail
folder. I would write code that removed the notification envelope when an
incoming message was moved AND the inbox contained no unread messages.
Problem solved. I am guessing this seperate notification process has access
to the total unread and read messages in a folder? I assume that because my
VBA macros do, so I would hope native Outlook code would as well.

And just because something is trivial or not is no reason not to develop the
functionality, especially if it is usefull and will save hours and hours of
productivity for the user. Heck, I can't tell you the number of times I've
spent hundreds of hours developing a GUI effect for my company with much less
functionality than the outlook problem I am speaking of.