This page gives instructions
on installing and setting-up SpamPal for use with the e-mail client
program Becky!
If you have a Hotmail account, you
may also want to see instructions on how to use the BkHotmail
plugin (for use with Becky!) to access your Hotmail email's through
SpamPal. |
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1. Install
SpamPal
2. Configure
SpamPal
3. Configure
your email program
3.1 Change your POP3 settings
3.2 Change your IMAP4 Settings
3.3 Change your SMTP settings
3.4 Create Filter/Message rules
4. Email
Virus Scanners and Firewalls
5. Whitelist
friends and contacts
5.1 Export your contacts email addresses
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Start installation by double-clicking on the SpamPal
Setup program (spampal.exe) and follow
the on-screen instructions. Upon completion, SpamPal will run, showing
its pink umbrella icon in your system tray.
If this installation is an upgrade of SpamPal
then the existing configuration of Becky is retained and the process
is now complete. If not, i.e. this is a new installation of SpamPal,
proceed with the steps below.
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| All you need to
know about extra configuration can be found here |
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SpamPal can either be configured
to run in transparent
or non-transparent
mode.
a) In non-transparent
mode, the user has to reconfigure
their email program to use it. This can sometimes cause problems
for people, as changes have to be made to Username, Server Name
and sometimes even port numbers, in order to get SpamPal to filter
their email. So before
you make any changes, take a note
of your user id
and pop3 server name
b) In transparent mode, the user
doesn't have to reconfigure their email program to use it (apart
from a simple message rule).
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If you installed SpamPal
in transparent mode then you can
skip the next section(s) and jump straight to the Create
Filter/Message rules section of this manual, which will tell you
how to setup a message rule to move the spam that SpamPal has detected,
away from your inbox and into the a SPAMTRAP folder.
If you installed SpamPal in non-transparent
mode then you have manually set
up your email program to fetch your mail through the SpamPal proxy
rather than directly from your ISP.
You need to know how you collect mail from your ISP, for example,
if you use POP3 to collect your
mail then your only need to change your POP3
settings and not the IMAP4 ones. |
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Select your default account and then go to Tools,
MailBox Setup
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To reconfigure your email program,
first make a careful note of your original settings.
You should append whatever
value you currently have in your
POP3 (Mail) Server
setting, to whatever you currently
have in the User
ID field (seperated
with a @ sign), and change the POP3
(Mail) Server setting to 127.0.0.1.
e.g. if your original values
were:
POP3 (Mail) Server: your.mailserver.com
User ID: fred.bloggs
then you would, for example, change them
to:
POP3 (Mail) Server: 127.0.0.1
User ID: fred.bloggs@your.mailserver.com
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You
may, at this point, get an error message about SpamPal not being
able to listen on the standard POP3 port.This is nothing to
be worried about; just write down the port number SpamPal tells
you and continue with this guide
This message means SpamPal is using Port 1110
instead of 110.
You don't have to put it into SpamPal because SpamPal already
knows it is using port 110.
Instead, you have to tell your email program to use port 1110
instead of 110.
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| Don't
worry; just add @localhost to the username and leave the server
name as is |
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| continue
regardless; SpamPal copes with usernames that contain two @s
without difficulty. |
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| Incoming
Mail (POP3):mail.btopenworld.com |
Incoming
Mail (POP3): 127.0.0.1 |
| Username:
fred.bloggs |
Username:
fred.bloggs@mail.btopenworld.com |
| Incoming
Mail (POP3): pop.west.cox.net |
Incoming
Mail (POP3): 127.0.0.1 |
| Username:
johnsmith |
Username:johnsmith@pop.west.cox.net |
| Incoming
Mail (POP3): pop.telus.net |
Incoming
Mail (POP3): 127.0.0.1 |
| Username:
fax07734 |
fax07734@pop.telus.net |
| Incoming
Mail (POP3):
192.168.1.1 |
Incoming
Mail (POP3): 127.0.0.1 |
| Username:
mary_jones |
Username:
mary_jones@192.168.1.1 |
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The
above Incoming POP3
Server Name, can be called:
Incoming Mail Server,
POP3 server, POP3 Username or Account Name depending on your
email program.
There are also two ways of specifying the local
server name, which should mean exactly the same thing (but on
some system only one of them will work): localhost
or 127.0.0.1 |
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| If there is a need to change you POP3,
SMTP or IMAP
ports, then Select your default account and then go to Tools,
MailBox Setup and select Misc: |
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| If you are still having a problem,
why not give this setup page
a try |
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Select your default account and then go to Tools,
MailBox Setup .
As you are going to be using IMAP,
you need to change the Mail Protocol
to: IMAP4rev1 and then you need
to tick the
Connect on Opening Mailbox option.
Now write down the name of your IMAP
Mail Server (e.g.. imap.yourisp.com)
and then replace this with 127.0.0.1
Now add an @ symbol and
the IMAP Mail Server Name, that
you wrote down earlier, to the User ID
box (e.g.. my_login_name@imap.yourisp.com)
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| Now you should check your emails;
you should now notice that you have a new folder called spamtrap
that was created by SpamPal, to store all your spam marked messages: |
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| If you wish to use SpamPal's
SMTP Proxy to auto-whitelist any email addresses that you send to,
you will need to change Becky's SMTP settings, as follows |
| Select your default account
and then go to Tools, MailBox
Setup . |
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Now, take a note of your
current SMTP Server, for example:
smtp.myisp.co.uk
Now change the current SMTP Server,
to: 127.0.0.1
Now go to SpamPal's Connections
page: |
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Now click on Add port and change
the Port Type to SMTP
Now, change the Server Name to
the SMTP Server you noted down
earlier, e.g..smtp.myisp.co.uk
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| Now, whenever you send
an email, SpamPal will automatically auto-whitelist it |
Occasionally, a spammer might
forge the email address of someone who is in your auto-whitelist
- for example, a colleague or an alternate email address or
yours. While you don't want to put this person in your blacklist
because they send you lots of genuine email, you don't want
them to end up in your auto-whitelist and bypass SpamPal's
spam-checking features.
Clicking on the Exclusions
pane will bring up a window into which you can enter the email
addresses of people who should never be added to the auto-whitelist.
Just add your colleagues here and you won't have to worry
about spammers forging their addresses to bypass SpamPal's
filtering. You can even add your entire employer's domain
- e.g. *@acme-widgets.com |
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If you are are using an IMAP4
server, you will not need
to setup a filter/message rule on your email program,
as SpamPal moves any spam tagged messages automatically into a folder
called inbox.spamtrap
on your
server.
If you are are using a POP3
server and want your email program to automatically filter the SpamPal-marked
messages into a separate Mailbox, so that you can more easily review
them, continue as follows |
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Select your default account and go to Tools and
select Filtering Manager.
In the Header
Box, Select Subject and enter
**SPAM** in the String
box
See below screen for how things should look:
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Specific instructions for using a variety of email
virus scanners with SpamPal can be found on the main
installation page
Some email virus filters want to sit between your
mail program and your mail server in just the way that SpamPal does.
There's actually no reason why they can't; you just have them up
in serial so that your virus filter fetches its mail through SpamPal
rather than directly from your mailserver, and then your email program
fetches the mail through the virus filter.
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In order to speed up the processing of your emails
and to prevent SpamPal from marking your friends or contact's emails
as spam, it's a good idea at this point to whitelist all your important
email addresses.
This can be done in four ways:
a) Use the pop3
automatic whitelist: this will whitelist non-spam
email's that you receive on a frequent basis
b) Use the smtp
automatic whitelist: which (if setup in 3.3)
will whitelist all email addresses that you send out
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| If
you are using this, especially in a business, as this is recording
all outgoing addresses, some people might view this as an infringement
upon their privacy, (if you are in UK you need to tell staff
of this policy before you start collecting data) |
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c) use
the Add to Whitelist option on
SpamPal's system tray: to manually
whitelist your email addresses by typing in an address (or by using
the dropdown box; to select from a list of recently received address):
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| d) Use
the SpamPal Whitelist Email Addresses
page to manually
whitelist your email addresses: |
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The
whitelist function only looks for email addresses in certain
headers of your email.
These headers are currently: From:,
Reply-To:,
Sender:, Mailing-List:
and Return-Path: |
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Initially, you will notice that using SpamPal
makes fetching your email a little slower. This is because SpamPal
has to check everything against the DNSBL lists (Public Blacklists)
to see what email's are from a spammer and which aren't.
However, through it's Auto-Whitelist feature(s),
SpamPal will quickly learn about the people and machines that send
you lots of email, and adds them to a list of trusted senders. Because
they're trusted, SpamPal doesn't waste time any checking the DNSBL
lists (Public Blacklists) for them and so the more you use SpamPal,
the quicker it will get.
There are more hints and tip on how to optimise SpamPal here
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| You can use
this
plugin to automatically
export your Becky! email addresses, so that you can quickly whitelist
your contacts which will speed up the processing of your emails and
to prevent SpamPal from marking your friends or contact's emails as
spam. |
| This completes the installation
and setup. |
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