Click for SpamPal's Homepage

This page gives instructions on installing and setting-up SpamPal for use with the e-mail client program,
TheBat

Quick Index

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

1. Install SpamPal

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 TheBat is retained and the process is now complete. If not, i.e. this is a new installation of SpamPal, proceed with the steps below.


::Top::
2. Configure SpamPal
All you need to know about extra configuration can be found here

::Top::
3. Configure Your Email Program
Now you have set up SpamPal, you need to tell your email program to fetch your mail through the SpamPal proxy rather than directly from your ISP.

You need to 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.

::Top::

3.1 Change your POP3 settings

Load The Bat, then select Properties from the Account menu. Click on the Transport option in the list to the left, and you should see something like this: (Screen before changes)

Account window
We'll need to make changes to the Mail Server and User fields.

Now, write down the name of your POP3 server in the Mail Server field (e.g..pop3.yourisp.com) and
then replace this with
127.0.0.1

Now add an @ symbol and the POP3 server name, that you wrote down earlier, to the User field
(e.g.. my_login_name@pop3.yourisp.com)

Screen after changes:
Modified account settings
Note 1: if you got the message about SpamPal not being able to use the standard POP3 port...
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.
Note 2: If the server name already is localhost
Don't worry; just add @localhost to the username and leave the server name as is
Note 3: If your POP3 username already contains an @
continue regardless; SpamPal copes with usernames that contain two @s without difficulty.
Before Using SpamPal
After Using SpamPal
Example 1
Incoming POP3 Server Name:  pop3.yourisp.com Incoming POP3 Server Name: localhost
Username:  name@surname Username:name@surname@pop3.yourisp.com
Example 2
Incoming POP3 Server Name:  mail.yourisp.com Incoming POP3 Server Name: 127.0.0.1
Username: my_login_name Username: my_login_name@mail.yourisp.com
Example 3 (using LAN IP Address)
Incoming POP3 Server Name:  192.168.1.1 Incoming POP3 Server Name: 127.0.0.1
Username: my_login_name Username: my_login_name@192.168.1.1
Note 4: Server names
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
Click OK to save your changes.

Now try to check your mail; if you don't get any errors, continue to the next step. You may be asked to re-enter your POP3 passwords; this is nothing to worry about. If you get an error from TheBat, check that you've configured the incoming POP3 server to localhost and, if necessary, that the port has been set right. If you get an error from SpamPal, check you've added the servername to the username correctly, and that your Internet connection is active.


::Top::
3.2 Change your IMAP4 settings

Coming Soon...


::Top::

3.3 Changing your SMTP settings

If you wish to use SpamPal's SMTP Proxy to auto-whitelist any email addresses that you send to, you will need to change TheBat's SMTP settings, as follows
Select Properties from the Account menu. Click on the Transport option in the list to the left, and you should see something like this: (Screen before changes)
Account window
Now, take a note of your current Send Mail SMTP Server, for example: smtp.myisp.co.uk

Now change the current Send Mail SMTP Server, to: 127.0.0.1

Now go to SpamPal's
Connections page:

Now click on Add port and change the Port Type to SMTP

Now, change the Server Name to the Send Mail SMTP Server you noted down earlier, e.g..smtp.myisp.co.uk

Now, whenever you send an email, SpamPal will automatically auto-whitelist it
Note: Never Auto-Whitelist option
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

::Top::

3.4 Create Filter/Message Rules

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

From the Account menu select Sorting Office/Filters. Select Incoming Mail from the list of filter types then click New to bring up the filter creation window,

On the Rules tab, give your filter a sensible name then in the first Filtered Strings box type ^X-SpamPal: SPAM, and set Location to Anywhere. Go to the Options tab and ensure that Regular Expressions is checked. Now, on the Actions pane, check Delete the message and Create a copy of message in another folder. Click the little tree icon beside this latter option, then click New and create a folder called Spam Trap. Make sure this one's selected as the folder to copy the message into. Now click Close to dismiss the filters window.


::Top::

4. Email Virus Scanners & Firewalls

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.


::Top::

5. Whitelist Friends and Contacts

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

Note 1: Privacy: smtp automatic whitelist
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)

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):

d) Use the SpamPal Whitelist Email Addresses page to manually whitelist your email addresses:
Note 2: Headers that the whitelist compares against
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:

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
This completes the installation and setup.

::Top::