Junk E-mail Filter synching for Outlook.com/EAS accounts
I’m using my Outlook.com account on 2 separate computers both running Outlook 2013.
I noticed that the Blocked and Safe Senders Lists of the Junk E-mail Options for my Outlook.com accounts aren’t synchronized. They used to do this when I was still using Outlook 2010 with the Outlook Hotmail Connector.
How can I sync my Junk E-mail Filter lists now that I’m using an EAS account?
Since Outlook 2013, the Exchange Active Sync (EAS) protocol is being used to sync with Outlook.com/Hotmail accounts rather than the DeltaSync protocol which is being used by the Outlook Hotmail Connector in Outlook 2010 and previous.
Unfortunately, the EAS protocol, which is also being used to sync your Outlook.com mailbox with the Windows 8 Mail app, smartphones and tablets, doesn't support synching of the Blocked and Safe Senders list. See the “Background info” section below for more details.
It is best to configure these lists on the Outlook.com website. Since the filtering is then completely server-side, all clients are affected.
Managing Safe and Blocked Senders lists on Outlook.com
To manage your Safe and Blocked Senders on Outlook.com, click on the Gear icon left of your name in the top right corner and select: Options.
In the “Preventing junk email section”, you’ll find a link called “Safe and blocked senders”. If you are already logged on, then this direct link will take you there as well.
Manage your Safe and Blocked lists on Outlook.com instead of in Outlook itself.
Background info
The EAS protocol is intended as a very lightweight protocol primarily for mobile devices running on a battery and often connected with a mobile data plan.
Synching Blocked and Safe Senders lists and processing Junk E-mail locally would be too inefficient as you don't want to spent precious bandwidth and battery power on Junk. Therefor, it is assumed that all this has already been pre-processed at server level.
With that in mind, the Outlook-level Junk E-mail filter should be seen as an additional filter for Outlook.com accounts and not as the main filter.
When you are using Outlook on a Windows RT device such as the Surface tablet (not the Pro version), then you’ll notice that the Junk E-mail Filter functionality has been disabled completely (except for Exchange mailbox accounts). This is because of the same energy saving reasons so Outlook RT would be more efficient on less powerful and battery powered devices as well.
