I recently (a month or so ago) came across a product, POPFile, which has solved my SPAM problem. I previously received 400+ emails a day, many (no, MOST) of which were SPAM. I had a variety of SPAM filters, including using DNS blocking services and a commercial product that filters mail based on automatically updated rules from the company.

I was still dealing with 20-40 emails a day that I had to delete, PLUS I had to check the "quarantine" area of this product to make sure that no false positives came through (which happened frequently enough to be frustrating).

Anyway, now I've completely removed the commercial product and installed POPFile. I'm still experimenting with it, but I wanted to post this page so I can refer friends to it to help them with their SPAM issues. It solves my problems in the following manner:

1. SPAM is filtered to a folder in my email client
2. The product looks at MY spam and how I classify it, and makes decisions on future received email based on my classifications.
3. I'm no longer using one interface to read mail and another to check for false positives
4. It's very simple to scan the spam folder a few times a day; when one comes in incorrectly, a URL is available in the message that I go to to reclassify future mail of this type to "normal".
5. When the occasional SPAM filters through to my in-box, I also can click on the URL and fix it for the next message like the current one.

You can download POPFile from http://popfile.sourceforge.net .. the latest version right now is 0.18, but 0.19 is coming soon with several nice features.

When popfile is installed it knows nothing. It installs a web server on your machine at address 127.0.0.1:8080 (port 8080), as well as a pop3 server. Follow instructions on the site to reconfigure your email package to read mail through POPFile. Also, visit your POPFile website (http://127.0.0.1:8080) and go to the buckets tab and create two (and only two) buckets .. call them spam and normal. (NOTE: the reasoning for this is that POPFile works best with two folders.)

I would then suggest going to the Security tab, changing the number of emails per page to 50, turn ON subject line modification, and make sure Link header is turned on. Now go back to the Buckets tab and turn OFF subject modification for the "normal" bucket. This will put [spam] at the start of all spam, and leave "normal" alone.

This makes setting up your email filtering absolutely trivial -- if you can't figure out how to check the header that's installed (X-Text-Classification: spam), you can trigger on "[spam]" in the subject line. Set up a filter in your email to move all notes that popFile marked as SPAM to your spam mailbox (create it if needed).

Now, process some email through it (i.e. receive mail), and those that you would classify as SPAM, tell popfile that it's spam. The way to do that is to in your email client, show headers; one header from my recent email is:

X-POPFile-Link: <http://127.0.0.1:8080/jump_to_message?view=popfile1926=33.msg>

You can also go to the main page (http://127.0.0.1:8080) and just review all spam.

It will work best to just classify SPAM initially, then start classifying messages as NORMAL when you get a note that's mis-classified.

NOTE: I received about 20 messages the first time I installed it, and after that point popfile was about 80% accurate. It's risen to 99% over time.

The advertising in popfile says it works fine for multiple buckets .. you could classify mail from your mom to one bucket, etc. I found this doesn't work as well as simply classifying it as spam or not- spam.

Anything else? I assume you can install it OK, there is enough documentation on various email packages and systems to figure that out.

Good luck!

Norm Fisher
May 28, 2003