Our network administrators do the best job they can to prevent it, but spam is just an unavoidable part of having an email account. So here is how to set your junk mail settings in Outlook. Now right now I am in my Inbox and I have got a message that I want to mark as junk. So to do that, I am going to right-click, select Junk, and choose Block Sender. Now I am going to get a message that the sender of this message has been added to my Blocked Senders list and the message has been moved to the Junk Email folder.

I can click OK and move on. But what if I want to find out what is in that junk email folder and why didn't it moved it to Junk in the first place. So let's go over to our Junk Email folder and see what we have got. It is on the left-hand side over here. So there are a few things in there. Now I actually see some things that I know it's definitely not junk and I want to remove those from my Blocked Senders list. There is a couple of ways that we can do this. The first thing we want to do is find out why this was moved into the Junk folder in the first place.

Let's go in to our Options. We will right-click on the email and choose Junk, Junk Email Options. So here is where we choose the type of junk filtering that is going to happen. Right now, it is set to No Automatic Filtering. That means that if I have specifically blocked somebody, it will move it to junk, but it won't do any filtering of its own. You can go over this list and choose which one you feel comfortable with. I like Low. It is going to take the most obvious junk and put it in the Junk Email folder.

I can go to the Blocked Senders tab in this list and see everybody that I have put on my Blocked Senders list. Here is the one I just put, because that was definitely junk. But here is the one that was put by mistake, so I am going to highlight that name and choose Remove. That person's name is now out of my Blocked Senders list, but there's still one more thing I have to do to it. I am first going to click OK to get out of this dialog box. Now you will notice that that email is still in my Junk Email folder. I need to get it out of there, especially as I can't even see the contents of the email.

Because it has been marked as junk, all the photos and any interactions with this email have been completely blocked by Outlook. This is definitely a good thing, but to fix it, we need to put it back in our inbox and flag it as not junk. I am going to right-click on this email and go back to my Junk menu and choose Not Junk. Now it's going to move the message back to the Inbox folder and I am going to choose this button to say Always trust email from jstratton@lynda.com.

I can do the same thing to this one. I go down to Junk, choose Not Junk and it gets moved back to my inbox. Now once the email is in my inbox, that's how I can actually see everything that was in the body of the email. So that is how we handle junk options in Outlook 2013.