Quick Guide to the POPFile anti-SPAM proxy

Introduction

POPFile is a command-line, free anti-SPAM proxy for Windows and MacOS.

Locally, data are saved into an SQLite3 database, so you can access them from any tool. POPFile is written in Perl but it's self-contained so you just have to run the installer to be up and running.

Setup

Unless you chose different ports during the install, POPFiles opens TCP110 (so you'll have to configure your e-mail client to connect to localhost instead of your ISP's POP server), and TCP8080 (for the user interface.)

Before running the install program, close your e-mail client so that POPFile can attempt to reconfigure it automatically.

During the install, you'll be prompted to provide POPFile with at least two "buckets", ie. folder names where POPFile will save incoming e-mails. The most basic way is to simply choose "spam" and "clean", but you can add more ("work", "home", "projectA", etc.)

After POPFile is up and running, restart your e-mail client, and check the configuration of each POP3 accounts it handles: The POP3 server should be "127.0.0.1", and the login used should be in the form of "pop.myisp.net:username". If you migrated from another SPAM manager like K9, make sure your e-mail client is reconfigured to connect to POPFile on TCP110 (by default, K9 listens on TCP9999: In Eudora, change Tools > Options > Ports from 9999 to 110.)

Next, you'll have to configure your e-mail client so that it knows what to do when e-mail has been checked by POPFile. In Eudora, click on Tools > Filters, click on New to add a new header for each "bucket" that you created above, and set the following items for each category:

SPAM

In case POPFile incorrectly analyzed an e-mail, open its UI, and go to the History tab to requalify the e-mail.

To contribute to POPFile Real Time Statistics, click on the Security page in the interface, and click on the button in the "Reporting Statistics" section.

To requalify e-mails from eg. "non-spam" to "spam", the alternative to the POPFile web interface is the Windows applet ???.

Where is the database?

"c:\Documents and Settings\Fred\Application Data\POPFile\popfile.db"

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