Microsoft: Group Policy Setting to Disable the Junk E-mail UI and Filtering Mechanism for Microsoft Outlook

<< Symptoms >>
In Outlook, the Junk E-mail settings may not be available for you to configure. For example, when you look at the Delete group on the main Ribbon in Outlook 2010, the Junk control is disabled (grayed out). This is demonstrated in the following figure.

 

Or, in earlier versions of Outlook, the Junk E-mail Options button is missing from the Preferences tab in the Options dialog box.

 
<< Cause >>
This symptom occurs when you have the 'Hide Junk Mail UI' group policy configured for Outlook. The following figure shows the location of this policy for Outlook 2010 in the group policy editor.

This policy setting disables the Junk E-mail settings in the Outlook user interface as well as stopping the filtering of e-mail messages by the junk e-mail filter in Outlook.


<< Additional Information >>
When this policy is enabled, the following data in the registry is configured.

Key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\x.0\Outlook
DWORD: DisableAntiSpam
Value: 1 = policy is in effect

Note, x.0 in the above registry path represents the version of Outlook (15.0 = Outlook 2013, 14.0 = Outlook 2010, 12.0 = Outlook 2007, 11.0 = Outlook 2003)

If you need to change this policy, please work with your Administrator to configure the policy as either Disabled the policy or as Not Configured.

There is related group policy called Junk E-mail protection level that has a No Protection option, as shown in the following figure.

This is a policy similar to the Hide Junk Mail UI policy except with the 'No Protection' setting Outlook still performs some level of junk e-mail filtering. When you enable the Junk E-mail protection level policy with the No Protection setting, the following junk e-mail scanning features still take place on a message:

• Links can be disabled if the message is suspected as being phish.
• The message sender is compared against your Safe Senders and Blocked Senders lists, and the message is treated accordingly.
• The message sender's domain suffix is compared against the Blocked Top-Level domains list, and the message is treated accordingly.
• The message encoding is compared against the Blocked Encodings list, and the message is treated accordingly.

There is no need to enable the Junk E-mail protection level policy if the Hide Junk Mail UI policy is already enabled. However, if you disable or do not configure the Hide Junk Mail UI policy, then the Junk E-mail protection level policy is a possible alternative if you still need to manage junk e-mail filtering options in Outlook.


Reference:
Outlook: Policy setting to disable the Junk E-mail UI and filtering mechanism
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2180568