SpamAssassin™

To help our customers fight the Spam problem we have installed SpamAssassin on the mail servers. The software has configurable settings that allow you to control the threshold level for marking incoming email as spam. It will even allow you to delete it as soon as it has been identified so you never see it in your inbox.

Enabling and Configuring

The following steps will guide you through the process of setting up SpamAssassin on your eMail account.  Though the software is installed on our server, the settings are up to each individual.

1. In a browser window, enter http://mail3.txworld.com or if you have your own domain, http://mail.mydomain.com.
2. You will see three different options on the web page that appears.  Click on the link that allows you to set Spam Assassin preferences
3. Login. Your login id is your email account (myname@txworld.com) or for customers with their own domain, myname@mydomain.com.
4. Login with the password you currently use to retrieve your eMail.
5. Click the link provided to "enable Spam Assassin"
6. Select either Filter or Delete mode. Choose Filter if you want to experiment with the settings that determine if incoming eMail is marked as Spam.
7. Set the required threshold "points", where 1 does not identify anything as junk, and 10 catches everything including the eMail from dear old mom.  Play with this setting until it is where you like it, starting with 5 as a default is recommended.
8. You can "whitelist" email addresses that you expect to receive, such as company email or friends addresses.  When you add an address to your whitelist it will not be examined by SpamAssassin.

Filtering in Outlook Express

The following example shows you how you might want to filter incoming email using Outlook Express XP. For our purposes, we have appended the phrase "*****SPAM*****" to the subject line to easily identify the mail message.  You may choose any phrase for your eMail account. 

1. Open Outlook Express

2. Click Tools, Message Rules, Mail
   

3.  put a check in "Where the subject line contains...."
    put a check in "delete it"
   
   

4. Click on "contains specific words"
   

5. In the top text field type in *****SPAM***** (5 asterisks on both sides of the word spam)
   
   

6. Click add, then ok, ok, and ok.

Instead of deleting the Spam outright, you can also choose to move it to a folder such as your Deleted Items.