What's the point of the Junk E-Mail folder?

I was a member of a speaker panel at a Butler Group 'Email Management Strategy Briefing' in London recently and was asked a simple question: "What's the point of having a Junk E-mail folder in Outlook 2003? Surely, if it's junk, it's junk, so why keep it?"

The reason is that the Junk E-mail folder gives each Outlook user a degree of control over incoming items that have successfully made it through their mail server junk e-mail filters but are suspicious enough to be treated with caution. Both Exchange Server 2003 and Outlook 2003 use Microsoft's Smartscreen Technology to filter out unwanted spam. To get this functionality for Exchange Server 2003 you need to deploy the Intelligent Message Filter (IMF) - a free download which was first released almost a year ago. To get Smartscreen protection in Outlook 2003 you simply need to use Outlook 2003 - it's built right into the product. Smartscreen Technology is clever stuff because it has been developed from scanning the hundreds of millions of messages that pass through MSN and Hotmail every day. When you handle that many messages you get pretty good at spotting spam.

With both server-side and client-side anti-spam defences in place any email addressed to your mail box can firstly be filtered by IMF in the Exchange Server and secondly by Outlook 2003. Any mail that passes through IMF but has characteristics that resemble spam will be moved automatically to the Junk E-Mail folder. This allows you to treat any email in this folder with caution. Remember, spam is frequently used as a carrier for viruses or as a means to 'phish' for valid online identities. And, after confirming there's nothing in your Junk E-mail folder that you want to keep, you can delete it all by simply right-clicking on the Junk E-mail folder and selecting Empty "Junk E-Mail" Folder. (By the way, if you don't want the second prompt to confirm your deletion just switch off the Warn before permanently deleting items option in Tools, Options, Other tab, Advanced Options.)

You can tweak your Outlook 2003 junk e-mail controls from Tools, Options, Preferences tab, Junk E-Mail... From here you can set the client-side junk e-mail filtering level and, if you really don't like having to monitor a Junk E-Mail folder, disable it completely by choosing to permanently delete suspected junk e-mail instead of moving it to the Junk E-Mail folder.

Personally I find the Junk E-Mail folder extremely useful. With IMF running on Exchange Server 2003 and Outlook set to provide second level filtering I am comprehensively protected from the productivity-sapping effect of unwanted spam.