Q: My Outlook e-mail program keeps receiving similar spam messages, even though I've labeled them as junk and blocked their senders. These e-mails have little rectangles between the letters in the subject line, and come from strange-sounding e-mail addresses (I've attached examples.) What can I do to stop this?
Gary Eickmeier, Lakeland, Fla.
A: You receive these e-mails because Outlook's spam filter doesn't recognize them as junk. You can improve the filter's performance with a setting change but you cannot stop spam.
These messages aren't recognized as junk because of the way they are written. If the e-mail's subject line was correctly spelled — such as "Heart Attack Defender" — the filter probably would have classified it as spam.
But with its present settings, the filter didn't catch the e-mail because the subject line is interspersed with nonalphabetic symbols: "He*art Att*ack Defend*er" (I have used the "*" symbol to represent the rectangular shapes in the spam you received.)
This is just the latest efforts by spammers to evade filters. Other classic spam subject lines include creative spellings such as "F*R*E*E." See "Common Spammer Tricks" at tinyurl.com/y3bbxz9d.
Your initial response was to block the e-mail sender, but that's not effective because the "from" addresses in spam are typically faked. Because each successive spam message is given a new fake address, it bypasses your list of "blocked" addresses.
To overcome this trickery, make your spam filter more "aggressive." Here's how:
