Exchange Messaging Outlook Volume 13, Number 32

Spam filters and Blackberry redirection

Spam can be a problem when you use the Blackberry Enterprise Server or the Desktop Redirector - spam gets forwarded to your Blackberry handheld before your Inbox spam filter removes it from the inbox. If your antispam software tags message subjects with [spam], you can create a filter in the blackberry software to prevent them from being forwarded but if you don't tag messages, you can slow the Blackberry processing to give your antispam filter time to process messages and remove spam before it gets forwarded to the device.

You do this by adding or editing ProcessMailDelay key in the registry on the computer running the Blackberry software.

If you use Desktop Manager and Redirector software, browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Research In Motion\BlackBerry\Redirector

If you're using BES, the keys are
32-bit: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \SOFTWARE \Research In Motion \BlackBerry Enterprise Server \Agents
64-bit: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Research In Motion\BlackBerry Enterprise Server\Agents

Look for the ProcessMailDelay DWORD and set the data value to 30 (decimal type) . If this value doesn't exist, create it . This value represents seconds and can be increased if its picking up the mail before your antispam filter has a chance to deal with it. In my experience, 30 seconds is more than enough time to allow Outlook's spam filter to work its magic.

Restart both the desktop manager and redirector or BES to force these changes to take effect.

Now messages moved to a junk mail folder by Outlook or an antispam scanner will not be forwarded to your Blackberry.

Outlook's HTML Line Spacing

We see a lot of questions about extra wide line spacing in HTML messages sent from Outlook 2007 to some web based accounts, such as Gmail. (OWA, Yahoo and Hotmail/Live render the messages without excess space between paragraphs. )

The complaints are loudest from users who upgraded and previously used the built-in editor in Outlook, not Word, as the behavior they were used to has changed. With the Outlook editor, pressing Enter at the end of a paragraph inserted a <br> tag in the HTML. Outlook 2007 uses the <p> tag. Browsers render the <p> tag as double spacing and since many people press Enter twice to add their own white space between paragraphs, the result is a very large space between paragraphs when you read messages in a browser.

The fix: press Shift+Enter instead of Enter. This creates a <br> tag at the end of the line and the browser will render this without extra white space. Keep in mind that there will always be differences in how HTML messages render in different mail clients, so keep the formatting simple and don't worry about it or use plain text format, which always looks ok in a browser.