Missing Features

The implementation of junk mail handling in Outlook 2007 is a great example of a design decision made without deep thinking. Take a look at this screen shot, which shows a user using the junk mail menu on an incoming spam email:

There are five options for the user:

1. Add sender to blocked sender list;
2. Add sender to safe sender list;
3. Add sender’s domain to safe senders list;
4. Add recipient to safe senders list; and,
5. Mark as not junk mail.

The first problem with this menu is the options aren’t written and formatted for reading on the screen.

The second problem is there are way too many options. They are all redundant. You really only need one option: Spam. And since you only need one option, it shouldn’t be in the right click menu. You can probably just place a button on the command row near “Reply” that says “Spam.”

Why just one option? First, a user doesn’t need to know how the spam system works. The user doesn’t need or want to know about safe or blocked sender lists. So there go options 1 and 2.

What about domain blocking? Well, Outlook should just do this after a critical threshold of emails from the same domain are marked as spam.

What about false positives? How do we mark email in the Junk mail folder that isn’t spam? Easy, just drag the email to the inbox. Outlook ought to just know to add the sender to a safe list when the email is moved.

Safe Sender Lists Don’t Work

There is a third, more broad problem with the Outlook junk handling implementation. Thanks to the way email meta information can be rewritten white and black lists don’t really work for email spam filtering. Sorry Outlook developers, but you need to take three six weeks, read this article and this article and build out a bayesian spam filter in Outlook.

Sure, it’s going to be hard to build. And sure it’s going to take a while. But good programmers tend to view hard as fun.

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