A way to block and/or bounce emails in Entourage?

[Liza]

Way back when I was still a Windoze user, I seem to remember there was a way to block emails from someone you didn't want to get emails from again. I also discovered Mailwasher which was very handy for blocking and bouncing. I can block emails via my isp, but only if I haven't downloaded them to Entourage and they are still on my isp's server.

This is obviously related to spam, and I'd like to find a way to do this relatively easily with Entourage. From what I found by searching, it seems this can be done using Rules, but I'm finding this feature quite confusing.

Can someone give me a brief step-by-step?

Because some of the stuff that gets into the Junk Mail folder is not junk, I'd like to be able to have a rule that does something to the effect of: "when an email is deleted from the Junk Mail folder, that sender will be blocked".

Thanks in advance if you can help!

 

[MisterMe]

To put it as bluntly as possible, I don't trust Entourage 2004 to block anything. When I switched from Outlook 2001 to Entourage 2004 at work last year, I made the mistake of enabling Entourage's spam filter. The only thing it blocked were real messages. Back then, my firm's Exchange server was still compatible with Mail. As you know, Mail colors tagged messages, but still allows you to see them if you want. By checking my Exchange account with Mail, I discovered that Entourage 2004 was blocking important messages. The Microsoft communications app gives no indication at all that it blocked anything. My messages simply did not show up in my Entourage In Box. I did not know what I was missing.

What was worse was that the blocks persisted even after I "disabled" spam filtering. Also, unlike Mail where spam filtering is intelligent and can be trained, Entourage's filter is dumb and can't be trained. Since my firm upgraded its Exchange server, Mail no longer works. I have no choice but to use Entourage 2004. I was able to kill the immortal spam filter in Entourage by deleting my old Exchange account settings and creating new ones with no filtering at all.

Another thing: Entourage does not delete blocked messages. They remain on the server. If your email account is server-based, then you cannot delete blocked messages via Entourage because it doesn't let you see them.

The takeaway message is that you are better off letting everything come through. You can manually delete the spam. Entourage 2004 will not allow you to correct its mistakes.