Email filtering / phishing protection on home PC

[s2kjock]

I have a friend who uses Outlook, and despite me regularly blocking domains/senders etc for them as periodic "manual filtering", they still seem to get 1-6 spam emails a day, some of which may be phishing of some kind. The individual can get confused, and while they still need email to communicate with friends and family, plus deal with things like Amazon/online suppliers/utility companies etc I am concerned about them clicking on something they ought not to.

My IT knowledge is very limited, but what sorts of things can I do to mitigate the risk of them giving away info to folk they shouldn't or downloading something they shouldn't?

Possible solutions I could come up with were:

Adding some kind of filtering on Outlook rule to block emails with "congratulations" "prize" "twitter" and common scam type content? Unsure if this is possible though - I don't use outlook myself, just gmail.

Adding their account into gmail and accessing email via that only (I use gmail and hardly ever get anything dodgy at all) - I do use a gmail address only though, so perhaps their filtering does not work if you are adding an outlook account?

Do any of the anti-virus programmes work to delete dodgy emails before they hit the inbox? Happy to pay a reasonable amount for one if they are effective.

Any other setting I can make on Outlook to help?

Nuclear option is just me accessing and "manually" filtering their email for them and forwarding legit stuff to a gmail account for them to look at, which is possible and they would likely not have an issue with it, but not ideal.

[xeny]

Common trick for this situation is set gmail to collect the email from their existing account, and then they collect form that account as gmail's spam filtering is pretty good.

Who is their email currently with?

Edited by xeny on Wednesday 24th November 19:35

[deckster]

As above - get gmail to access the email server directly. You'll need to know the server details and your friend will need to get used to the gmail interface, but its spam filtering is excellent and far better than any rules you can add to Outlook.

[jesusbuiltmycar]

Most of the spam I ge is from gmail ….

I set up a filter so all gmail goes straight in the bin …

In all seriousness if you are really concerned most email systems allow you to setup a white list so that only emails from known senders can get through

Edited by jesusbuiltmycar on Wednesday 24th November 20:24

[s2kjock]

Thanks everyone. Their outlook emails are via BT so I guess I just need to check all the settings etc from Outlook for that and then add in to Gmail, which may be the simplest option. I have done that to access work emails on my gmail account before so should hopefully manage.

Would that transfer in historic emails on Outlook to gmail?

I agree re using gmail as being a pain - I haven't found a way to make it appear as simple as Outlook, but it is accessible.

I could always try the whitelisting of recognised senders also, which I presume is not difficult to do on Outlook? Only issue with that is if ordering something online from a new supplier, but maybe that is a case of checking trash/spam periodically and then approving.

[Bikerjon]

You mean they use Outlook with a btinternet.com email address? I'd ditch Outlook and BT and just set them up with a new Gmail account. Spam has pretty much become a thing of the past if you use the right email system.

[jonsp]

s2kjock said:

I agree re using gmail as being a pain - I haven't found a way to make it appear as simple as Outlook, but it is accessible.

In which case set up Outlook to access Gmail. See here

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/add-a-g...

For your friend assuming they don't want to change their address to @gmail.com who about this?

1/ Set up a new gmail address for them

2/ Tell Outlook to forward all email sent to their current address to @gmail

3/ Set up Outlook to pull email from @gmail per the link above

This way they get gmail's spam filtering with outlook's ease of use. Haven't tried this but seems like it should work.

[xeny]

s2kjock said:

I agree re using gmail as being a pain - I haven't found a way to make it appear as simple as Outlook, but it is accessible.
.

Each to their own - I far prefer it to Outlook, and an issue at work is people punting work email to gmail to avoid having to touch Outlook or OWA.