Dealing with spam undelivered emails in Outlook

The battle to put email on a leash continues, with today's installment focusing on dealing with spam undelivered and spam out of office emails. If you aren't familiar with those terms, consider yourself lucky.

If by necessity or mistake your email is on the net and spammers have scrapped it, they start using it as the fake sender's address of their digital garbage and you start getting both automated messages from legitimate people telling you they've blocked "your" spam and the occasional Out of Office Autoreply. Often, the spammers will invent a name and email at your domain and if you get by default any email to your domain, you'll get that crap too. Oh Joy.

On one hand, these emails are from other innocent spam victims and who knows? - they just might have a legitimate reason to email you one day. So blacklisting them out of hand is not a great option. Further, once in a while you may send an email and get one or the other back, and you'll want that information. What to do?

The solution is to automatically route this auto spam to hell using Outlook Rules. Here's how to banish this slime from your Inbox:

1. Right click an "Undelivered Mail Return" message and pick Create Rule... from the popup menu.
2. Check the checkbox "Subject contains: Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender" and then click the Advanced Options... button.
3. Click Next once.
4. Now set what should be done with the message. Since stick it in the eye of the original spammer is not an option, choose "Delete it" and click Next.
5. Important step! On the next screen, check "Except where my name is in the To box" so you will still see legit messages of this kind. Click Next.
6. The rule is ready to go; so check the box to run the rule now, click Finished, and have the satisfaction of seeing the spam undelivered and it's ilk vaporize.
7. Repeat the above for Out of Office; just be sure to check for just the phrase "Out of Office Autoreply" and not the rest of the specific subject line.

That's it! Back to Work.