Use SpamBayes to Filter Your Junk E-mail

 

First and foremost here are some general rules on how to handle spam.

 

  1. Never, ever reply to have your name removed from the list. This just creates more spam for you.
  2. If you don’t want to get spam, never leave your address with any site.  When asked to fill out forms give them a bogus or personal (yahoo) e-mail address.
  3. Separate your business e-mail and personal e-mail addresses. Yahoo, hotmail and others will give you a free e-mail account.
  4. Aggressively filter your e-mail (see below).
  5. Accept the fact that spam will NEVER go away. You still get junk mail delivered to your house. Sometimes all you can do is delete it or throw it out.

 

Step 1:

Download the SpamBayes Outlook plugin here.

 

Note:  You must have Administrator rights on your PC to load software onto it.  If you don’t then submit a Track IT ticket to PC Lan Support.

 

Step 2:

Execute the install program by double-clicking on the application wherever you saved it on your local disk. 

 

Note:  You must close Outlook before you can install SpamBayes.

 

Step 3: 

The install Wizard will walk you through the installation. Take all the defaults because you can change them later.

 

Note:  Make sure the check box for “Microsoft Outlook Addin is checked. You DON’T want to install the “Server/Proxy” application.

 

 

Step 4: 

The configuration wizard will create two new folders for you.  They are called “Junk E-Mail” and “Junk Suspects”.    Again, take all the defaults when going through the configuration wizard. 

 

Step 5. 

You may notice this new icon on your Outlook tool bar.   You can click on the drop down box to make any changes using the “SpamBayes Manager.”

 

Click on each tab to familiarize yourself with the configuration.  The “Filtering” tab is important.  You will want to lower the scores for “Certain Spam” and “Possible Spam.”  Here are the scores I use. I aggressively filter all my messages so that’s why my scores are low. 

 

 

 

Step 6:

It takes about two weeks for SpamBayes to learn your e-mail messages.  Be patient.  If good mail ends up in one of your “Junk” folders then simply go to that folder, highlight the good messages and “Recover from Spam.” 

 

Conversely, you can also “Delete As Spam” those message(s) you find in your inbox that are really spam.  The built-in database will keep track of good and bad messages for you. Next time you receive mail like that SpamBayes will handle it accordingly. 

 

 

 

You can always retrain SpamBayes by going into SpamBayes Manager.  Here are the other tabs you will find in the SpamBayes Manager:

 

The General tab

 

 

 

The Training Tab

 

 

The Advanced Tab

 

 

 

Support:

Submit a ticket in Track IT if you need help.  It’s important to know that SpamBayes will not block, delete or otherwise reject your e-mail messages.  You control what messages are filtered and what folder they go into.  You cannot lose mail by using SpamBayes.