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E-Mail Spam Checking
Introduction
This document describes how to setup Microsoft Outlook Express
to filter spam into a separate folder.
It does this by examining headers added to the email by the
School of Computing spam checking facilities in place on the
School of Computing servers.
Setting up Outlook Express with IMAP
If you're using Outlook Express with IMAP you will want to filter the mail when it is delivered by Exim. This means you don't have to do any of the steps below. To make Exim filter the mail for you, follow the instructions on this page.
Setting up Outlook Express with POP3
Outlook Express does not have the ability to filter mail based
on arbitrary headers. It will, however, allow filtering of
messages that contain certain keywords in the subject. What we
need to do is configure SpamAssassin to add a prefix to the subject
of mail it suspects is spam, as well as the extra header. To do
this we edit ~/.spamassassin/user_prefs which contains
the SpamAssassin user setup. Add the following line :-
rewrite_subject 1
This will add "CSLIKELYSPAM: " to the start of
the subject of suspected spam. If you want to change this to
something different, add the following line to the same file :-
subject_tag any-other-subject-prefix:
Now we need to configure Outlook Express to refile mail with the subject prefix.
- Select the Mail Message Rule on the Tools menu.
- Tick the boxes "Where the Subject line contains specific words" and "Move it to the specified folder".
- Click on the blue "contains specific words" in the lower box.
- In the new window that comes up type "CSLIKELYSPAM:" (unless you changed the prefix) and press Add.
- Press OK.
- Click on the blue "specified" in the lower box.
- In the new window that comes up select the folder you'd like the spam to be placed in, creating a new one if necessary.
- Press OK.
- Scroll down box 2 and tick "Stop processing more rules".
- Finally give the rule a name in the bottom box.
- Click OK.
- You will now see the rule list showing the new rule.
- Click OK to finish.
The new rule is now active and will be run on any new mail you receive.