THE PRICE OF POSTAGE, Outlook Features
Using Outlook E-mail Postage requires no stamp purchases, visiting the post office or licking any of that yucky glue. It is simply a technology that helps stop junk mail. Think of it as an internal postal worker that asks your computer to perform a computation or puzzle, and then assigns the results to the message like a stamp of approval.
This certificate of legitimacy makes it difficult and time-intensive for spammers to send mass e-mail messages, but it does not change your experience when sending legitimate messages. When a postmarked message is received by Outlook 2007, the system can easily verify the validity of the message which signifies the sender’s computer incurred a certain cost in sending this message. As a result, it will get delivered straight to your Inbox, instead of being dumped in the Junk E-mail folder
Here’s how it works. Before messages leave your Outbox, Outlook stamps each message with an e-mail postmark which includes unique characteristics, including the list of recipients and the time when the message was sent. As a result, the postmark is valid only for that e-mail message. It takes some extra computer processing time to construct the postmark, which means it takes a little longer for messages to leave your Outbox. This is the computational cost incurred with using Outlook E-mail Postmarking.
When the recipient receives a postmarked message, his email program should recognize the postmark, deduce that it is probably not spam and take that into account when the spam filter evaluates the message.
You might be wondering how this helps prevent spam. Bottom line is that it is not cost effective for spammers to send messages that are postmarked. They need to send thousands of messages per hour. In order to generate a postmark for each message and still send messages at the same rate, they would need to spend a ton of money to buy more computers.
Outlook does not, however, postmark all messages you send. Here are some exceptions.
- Themessage recipient is in your Exchange Global Address List (GAL). Even if a recipient, such as a company vendor, has an external e-mail address, as long as it appears in the organization’s GAL, the outgoing message is still not postmarked.
- Before sending a message, the Junk E-mail Filter in Outlook evaluates the message to see if it looks, feels or smells like spam. Kind of like a drug sniffing dog. If the message does not have spam characteristics, Outlook does not postmark it because it is unlikely that the recipient’s spam filter will reject it.
- You or an e-mail administrator in your organization can turn off the Postmarking feature. To do that, go to Tools, Options. On the
Preferences tab, select Junk E-mail. Now clear the check box at the bottom of the window that pops up that reads “When sending e-mail, postmark the message to help recipient e-mail programs distinguish regular e-mail from junk e-mail.”
Just remember that if you turn it off, your guard dog will no longer be on duty and you never know what kind of mail you’ll receive disguised as legitimate messages.
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