Outlook 2003 is the latest version of Microsoft's email program. It includes a load of features such as a contacts manager, diary and a general section for holding your notes. Its email handling is flexible and it can download mail from a variety of servers, including Exchange, IMAP and POP3. It also has a built-in anti-spam filter.
As with most of the programs here, Outlook will allow you to build a list of people from whom you expect to receive email. Using this ensures that no matter how bad your anti-spam software is, or however spam-like your friends' messages are, mail from these
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addresses will always get through.
Outlook also lets you block mail sent from certain top-level domains. For example, if you are completely sure that you'll never get a message from Russia you can block messages sent from domains with the .ru suffix. If you don't want to block whole countries, you can still block languages. Well, nearly. In fact you can block messages that include certain codes that are only found in particular character sets. If you don't speak Japanese or any language that uses the Cyrillic alphabet you can tell Outlook to block these encodings and cut down on the potential spam you could receive.
There are four anti-spam settings, ranging from Off through to Safe Lists Only, where only mail from your friends will be allowed in. The middle settings are High and the default is Low. In our test the Low setting was relatively useful. It moved only 3.7 per cent of our real mail to the Spam folder, but managed to filter out nearly a third of the spam, too. This isn't great, but there's no hassle involved in getting it running and, if you already have Outlook, it's worth enabling. We'd still install a more accurate program alongside it, though.
