The Entourage User's WebLog

Do you ever send an email to yourself? While at first this may seem an unlikely event, there are several circumstances when it may be a quite reasonable proposition. For example, do you send messages to your home email address form your work computer? Or, do you send mails out to several people and put your own address in the 'To' field, and the list of recipients in the 'BCC' field? This latter situation is one that is often suggested in the newsgroups to people who want to circulate a news-type email, but keep the recipients addresses secret.

Whatever the reason, if you do, it is likely that you will often find that the copy of the email sent to yourself will end up marked as junk mail. this will likely happen if you have the junk Mail Filter set to 'High', or 'Exclusive'.

Why does this happen? You own email address is in your Address Book, so these mails should not be marked as junk, should they?

Well, normally Entourage doesn't mark mail as junk if it comes from a person in your address book, but there is one exception.
Entourage has a special contact that is designated as the 'Me' contact. Only one contact has this designation, and it gets a special icon in the address book, as shown by the picture on the right. Mail from an email address that belongs to this contact is excluded from the normal rule that address book contacts are considered 'Junk-Safe'. Usually, this contact is created when you first install Office, from the contact information that you fill in during the First Run process. After that time, you can assign any other contact to be the 'Me' contact at any time using the 'This Contact Is Me' menu item in the 'Contact' menu. This will assign a new Me contact and remove the designation from the previous 'Me' contact.

For most users, the only purpose of the Me contact is in the way the Junk Mail Filter treats it. A common practice in junk mail is to put the same email address (yours!) in the 'To' field and in the 'From' field. Mail addressed in this way is automatically treated as suspicious by the Junk Mail Filter. However, as described in the first paragraph, there are good and legitimate reasons why you may want to send mail to yourself and not have it marked as junk. there are a couple of ways to work round this.

The first is to use a simple rule, like this:

This simply checks for your email address in any incoming mail and changes the status to 'not junk mail'. Note that the 'Do not apply other rules...' check box is unchecked, so that other rules may still be applied to messages filtered by this rule, and that this rule must be high up in the list of rules to avoid it being missed if other rules catch the message first.

The problem with such a simple rule is that you will automatically mark a lot of junk mail as 'Not Junk' as well. All the junk mail that has your email address in the 'from' field will be passed as safe by this rule. So, obviously, it needs some refinement.

The next stage is to apply some other criteria to the rule, to be a little more certain that the mail really is from you. The 'Proper Name' is one such possibility. Often the lists of addresses used for sending spam will only contain email addresses and not proper names. So, junk mail supposedly from your email address could have some fake name (or none at all) in the proper name space: for example, "Pauline ". To catch this (and assuming you have you mail clients set up to use your proper name correctly), you can refine the rule to contain a second selection criteria:

So, now in order for the rule to run the email has to have both the right email address AND the right proper name (you also need to ensure the 'Execute' setting is set to "all criteria", not "any criteria"). This is a much better rule, but still not foolproof. A fair amount of spam seems to be able to pick up the right proper name as well - especially spam from lists that have been compiled from mailing list archives or newsgroups.

To improve things still further, we need to have a means of identifying the origin of an email beyond all doubt. This last method relies on an attribute that really couldn't be faked by any serious junk mail engine:

In this case, the rule looks for a specific header (called 'x-verify'), and only runs if it finds that header, and that header contains the phrase "barryw" (you can, of course, substitute and specific header name or phrase you like). Note also that I have changed the other selection criteria from a simple email address to the more generic "From is Me" - this rule will now work with mail from any email address in the Me contact, without having to have separate rules for each email address.

So, how does this header find it's way into my messages? Entourage has a way of inserting custom headers into every email you send. Under the Tools menu, select 'Accounts'. Double click on an account in the list of accounts to edit its settings, and select the 'options' tab. Here you can add the custom header, like this:

Naturally, you need to ensure that the header name and pass-phrase match those that you put in the mail rule. Also, in order to ensure that you comply with internet mail protocols, make sure your custom header name starts with 'x-', contains lower case only and has no spaces. Almost anything you like can go in the 'value' field, but it is best to ensure that the total length of the header name and value fields is less than 75 characters.

That's it. now, any mail you send yourself will not be marked as junk, yet you can be pretty certain that mail with forged headers containing your email address will still be correctly captured.

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