Why are some of my contacts flagged as "uncertain junk"?

So Outlook 2011 has some serious problems, especially after the latest update (14.1.0). Like corrupting your whole Address Book database (blowing away all your contacts).

Now I see my contacts in Outlook (apparently Outlook captured them before destroying the database), but numerous entries are flagged as “uncertain junk.”

Why?

In order for SpamSieve to consider your Outlook address book contacts, you would need to configure Outlook to sync with the Mac OS X address book and have Use Mac OS X Address Book checked in the SpamSieve preferences. Then SpamSieve will assign messages from those addresses a score of 0, i.e. least likely to be spam.

Thanks for the response, but I have both of those options set up as depicted.

Regardless of those settings, I don’t understand how contacts can be flagged as “uncertain junk.” I’m not talking about E-mail messages; I’m talking about the contacts themselves.

Oh, then this has nothing to do with SpamSieve; it only deals with messages.

Everything in Outlook can have one or more categories, of which Uncertain Junk is one. How your contacts were assigned this category I don’t know.

Thanks for the reply.

I didn’t think Outlook used the term “uncertain junk” (it doesn’t appear in a search of their Help documentation).

The list of categories is user-definable. There’s a built-in category called “Junk”, and SpamSieve adds a one called “Uncertain Junk.”

Thanks for the info.

Interesting that Outlook fails to distinguish between categories that apply to E-mail and categories that apply to contacts. That’s a big regression from years past, when they had this category stuff nailed, and others (like RIM/Blackberry) rendered their categories (and syncing with Outlook) useless by failing to make this distinction.

Microsoft Entourage also used the same categories for e-mail and contacts. There was a preference so that if you had given a contact a certain category, messages from that contact would automatically receive that category. It’s not clear to me how your contacts got this category. No other SpamSieve users have reported this problem, and I’ve not read about general problems with Outlook and categories.

Does the problem recur if you fix the contact categories manually?

Assigning categories in that direction (contact --> E-mail message) makes some sense, but the other direction does not. Over the course of several years, all of your contacts would be tagged with every type of E-mail they ever sent you. Ridiculous.

Haven’t tried removing those categories yet.

I wonder how many people are using Outlook 2011 yet. It’s a buggy POS, and I’ve installed the service pack. If you try to empty a folder that contains more than 200 messages (like Junk), it WILL crash. Seriously it will crash about 80% of the time in that case, and this is on multiple systems.

Even worse, it appeared to have been involved a complete annihilation of my Address Book, deleting 500 contacts. Turns out it was some kind of corruption or interruption of Address Book’s access to its own database (which remained at 300K the whole time), which was shaken loose when I went to back up my iPhone and triggered a sync. My contacts reappeared (not by being transferred from the phone), although the “me” flag was removed from my own entry in Address Book, causing SpamSieve to allow a bunch of spam that spoofed my E-mail address as its source.

Agreed. However, I think that’s jumping to conclusions. I’ve seen no evidence that Microsoft intends for it to work in the other direction. This is probably some sort of malfunction with your database.