Spam Blocker

The Thrift Internet mail server is equipped with a spam filter, however email filtering is not particularly aggressive. The reason that we do not aggressively filter subscriber email is because of 'false positive' concerns. We don't want anyone to miss critical email that may be mistaken as spam by our software. Our spam filtering is intended to reduce the volume of spam, but not remove it all. If you have a serious spam problem you may wish to use more aggressive filtering.

Note that the Thrift Internet mail server also filters viruses and, unlike our spam filtering, our virus filtering IS aggressive.

If you require more aggressive spam filtering you can obtain excellent filtering software for free. We recommend SpamPal for this purpose. You can configure Spam Pal to have as much aggressive filtering as you desire.

When SpamPal identifies an email message as spam it adds identifying text (**SPAM**) to the subject of the email. The email software should then be configured to either automatically delete the email or store it in a specified spam folder.

You can download SpamPal at no cost at this link:

Feel free to take some time to browse the spampal.org website to learn more about this excellent product.

After downloading, install SpamPal by double-clicking on the downloaded filename. You really don't need to do any configuration to SpamPal since the default configuration works fine. However, you will need to make a few changes to your email software (usually Outlook Express) in order to use SpamPal.

After you install SpamPal it should already be running. To verify that SpamPal is running, look for a little purple umbrella in the bottom-right of your monitor near the time. If it is not running go to the programs menu and start it.

SpamPal Configuration for Outlook Express:

Open Outlook Express, then click on Tools and then click on Accounts. In the box that opens, verify that you are on the Mail tab. Click on the Properties button and then select the Servers tab. You should see a box like this:

First you need to modify the Account name entry by adding an '@' sign and the POP3 server name (mail.thriftinternet.com) so that the new account name looks like this:

username@mail.thriftinternet.com

Of course you need to substitute your actual user name in the part to the left of the '@' sign.

You also need to change your POP3 server name to 127.0.0.1 to direct requests to SpamPal. The changes should look like this:

Click OK and then click Close. That should take you back to the Inbox.

Now we need to create a rule to automatically delete messages that are identified as spam by SpamPal. From the Inbox, click on Tools and then Message Rules and select Mail. On the Mail Rules tab click the New button. Now put a check in the box that says "Where the Subject line contains specific words" and also put a check in the box that says "Delete it". The box should now look like this:

Click on the blue link in the Rule Description box that says "contains specific words". Type **SPAM** into the top box. The box should look like this:

Click Add and then click OK. The New Mail Rule box should now look like this:

Click OK. The Mail Rules tab should now look like this:

Click OK. That should be it!

When you check your email you should see the little purple umbrella have a portion of it be green as you are checking. After checking your mail you can look your 'Deleted Items' email folder for any identified spam.