Sudden spam flood for user just back from vacation.

[Nathan Greurg]

Hi,
I have a colleague who has just returned from an absence of two weeks.
Normally her Outlook 2003 Spam filter does a good job and she doesn't
complain about spam at all.
But yesterday she was flooded with the stuff and I am trying to figure out
why.

I'm not really sure how Outlook deals with spam but I imagine that it has
accesss to blacklists, i.e. remote live lists of spam messages and spam
senders and maybe even a heuristics engine to figure out by itself if a
message is spam or not.

My theory is that she hit the Send/receive button before Outlook had time to
update its spam blacklist database.
Does that make sense ?

Here is a related question:
What does Outlook actually do when I go to the Office Update site and
download and install the Spam Filter Update?
Does that update the engine or the databases or both?
And does Outlook do daily checks on remote spam blaclists, like antivirus
software does, or does it only check when I go to the Office Update site ?

TIA

Nathan

 

[Brian Tillman]

I'm not really sure how Outlook deals with spam but I imagine that it
has accesss to blacklists, i.e. remote live lists of spam messages
and spam senders

To the best of my knowledge, Outlook's spam filter does not use blacklists.

and maybe even a heuristics engine to figure out by
itself if a message is spam or not.

It does have that, and I've been told that Microsoft uses the mail passing
through Hotmail to train it.

My theory is that she hit the Send/receive button before Outlook had
time to update its spam blacklist database.
Does that make sense ?

I don't think that's a factor.

Here is a related question:
What does Outlook actually do when I go to the Office Update site and
download and install the Spam Filter Update?
Does that update the engine or the databases or both?

The databases, usually.

And does Outlook do daily checks on remote spam blaclists, like
antivirus software does, or does it only check when I go to the
Office Update site ?

No spam blacklists at all.