This new free tool from Microsoft gives you a quick way to report suspected spam back to Microsoft - from a simple link in either Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007.

It will give Microsoft and it's partners more information that they can use to improve their spam filters.  Microsoft has done this for some time with the junk email reporting in Hotmail, so this tool is just an extension of that for Outlook users.

" The Junk E-mail Reporting Tool lets you directly report junk e-mail to Microsoft and its affiliates for analysis to help us improve the effectiveness of our junk e-mail filtering technologies.

The Junk E-mail Reporting Tool submits e-mail to Microsoft when you explicitly choose to do so. If you receive a junk e-mail and want to report it to us for analysis, first select the e-mail in Outlook and then click the junk e-mail button on your tool bar. You will see a pop-up window asking whether you want to report the selected e-mail to Microsoft and its affiliates. When you click “Yes” to confirm that you’d like to report the selected e-mail as junk e-mail, the junk e-mail will be deleted from your Inbox and sent to FrontBridge, a Microsoft company, for analysis to help us improve the effectiveness of our junk e-mail filtering technologies."

So this tool won't reduce the amount of spam you get but, over time, it might help improve Microsoft's anti-spam filters for Outlook and other Microsoft email products.

The free download is 2.6MB and available from Microsoft.