Using Outlook Quick Steps to Report Spam & Non-Spam to Microsoft

Tony Redmond talked about “How to report spam that arrives in Office 365 to Microsoft” on his Thoughtsofanidlemind blog today.  He covers reporting spam messages by forwarding header information to Microsoft. I commented on the post that Microsoft also provides their Junk E-mail Reporting Add-in for Outlook, an easy way for end users to submit messages for analysis.  We distribute the add-in as part of our base image at work, but as Tony points out, not all companies do so, nor do they always let their employees install software.  When you work at a University, you forget that not everyone has as relaxed an environment as ours when it comes to those sorts of restrictions.

Assuming you can install the reporting add-in, even though it lets you report spam that was missed (a false negative), it can’t report a message mistakenly classified as spam (a false positive). I’m not sure why they didn’t include this function. So even with the plugin you might still be using email to submit those reports to Microsoft.

You can use the Quick Steps feature in Outlook to make reporting spam and non-spam to Microsoft quick and easy. Here are the steps to setup two quick steps, one for submitting spam and another for submitting non-spam. I followed the guidance provided by Microsoft on TechNet for these instructions.

Create a Quick Step to report spam:

1. In Mail, on the Home tab, in the Quick Steps group, in the Quick Steps gallery, click the Create New Quick Step.
2. Enter a name for the quick step. I used “Report SPAM to Microsoft” for mine.
3. From the Action list, select Forward message as an attachment.
4. Enter junk@office365.microsoft.com in the To box.
5. Click Show Options.
6. Edit the Subject field to only be the variable <subject> to substitute the subject of the spam message. Note that this is the only variable supported by Quick Steps, and it cannot be used anywhere else but in this field.
7. Check the box for Automatically send after one minute delay.
8. Click Add Action and select Delete message from the list. If you’d rather move the message to Junk Email or permanently delete it, select the corresponding action.
9. If you’d like to create a shortcut key to trigger the quick step, select one of the Ctrl-Shift-Number options in the Shortcut key dropdown list.
10. If you’d like a reminder of what the quick step does, enter a comment or description in the Tooltip text box.
11. Click Finish and you’re done.

Create a Quick Step to report non-spam:

1. In Mail, on the Home tab, in the Quick Steps group, in the Quick Steps gallery, click the Create New Quick Step.
2. Enter a name for the quick step. I used “Report HAM to Microsoft” for mine.
3. From the Action list, select Forward message as an attachment.
4. Enter not_junk@office365.microsoft.com in the To box.
5. Click Show Options.
6. Edit the Subject field to only be the variable <subject> to substitute the subject of the spam message. Note that this is the only variable supported by Quick Steps, and it cannot be used anywhere else but in this field.
7. Check the box for Automatically send after one minute delay.
8. Click Add Action and select Move to Folder from the list. Select Inbox from the list of available folders. I’m usually cleaning out messages form the Junk Email folder, so I like to move them back to the Inbox.
9. If you’d like to create a shortcut key to trigger the quick step, select one of the Ctrl-Shift-Number options in the Shortcut key dropdown list.
10. If you’d like a reminder of what the quick step does, enter a comment or description in the Tooltip text box.
11. Click Finish and you’re done.

After you have created these quick steps, you can trigger them a few different ways:

1. Right mouse click on a message, select Quick Steps, and then select the step from the flyout menu.
2. Select the message and click the desired quick step in the Quick Step Gallery on the Home tab.
3. Open the message and click the quick step in the Quick Step Gallery on the Home tab.

Quick steps make it fast and easy to help tidy your Inbox mailbox and give Microsoft the feedback it needs to improve its ability to identify and eliminate spam.