Mercury is
an Internet email server and gateway for small and medium sized businesses
(and some larger ones too!)
SpamPal can be easily be used to provide front-end protection from
SPAM for all Mercury mailboxes that are setup.
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1. Install
SpamPal
2. Configure
SpamPal
3. Configure
your Mercury Server
3.1 Change your POP3 settings
3.2 Create Filter/Message rules
4. Email
Virus Scanners and Firewalls
5. Whitelist
friends and contacts
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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 Mercury is retained and the
process
is now complete. If not, i.e. this is a new installation of SpamPal,
proceed with the steps below.
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To setup SpamPal,
go to Options and then look at
the
Connections pane (see screen below).
Now select the POP3 (any servername)
option and click Properties |
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| Now change
the Local Port Number
to port 1101 (see screen below)
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| All
you need to know about extra configuration can be found here |
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Now
you have set up SpamPal, you need to tell your Mercury server 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
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Go to Mercury and from
the Configuration menu select Mercury
POP3 Client. Highlight the POP3 connection
you wish to use with Spampal and click the Change button
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| Rather
than modifying the existing POP3 setup, create a new
one. Each POP3 account has a checkbox for enable/disable. |
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Now, write down the name of your POP3
Server in the POP3 Host box
(e.g..pop3.yourisp.com) and then
replace this with 127.0.0.1
Now add an % symbol and the POP3
Server that you wrote down earlier, to the Username box
(e.g.. my_login_name%pop3.yourisp.com)
(The setup should look like the screen below) |
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| Don't
worry; just add @localhost to the username and leave the server
name as is |
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| continue
regardless; SpamPal copes with usernames that contain two @s
without difficulty. |
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| Username: fred.bloggs |
Username: fred.bloggs@mail.btopenworld.com |
| Incoming
Mail (POP3) Server: |
Incoming
Mail (POP3) Server: localhost |
| Username: johnsmith |
Username:johnsmith@pop3.west.cox.net |
| Incoming
Mail (POP3) Server: pop3.west.cox.net |
Incoming
Mail (POP3) Server: localhost |
| Username: fax07734 |
fax07734@pop.telus.net |
| Incoming
Mail (POP3) Server: pop.telus.net |
Incoming
Mail (POP3) Server: localhost |
| Username: mary_jones |
Username: mary_jones@192.168.1.1 |
| Incoming
Mail (POP3) Server: 192.168.1.1 |
Incoming
Mail (POP3) Server: 127.0.0.1 |
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| Coming soon... |
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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.
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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
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| 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) |
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| Consider
disabling the auto whitelisting feature in Spampal. You might
get multiple
copies of the same spam to different users. This
will cause the return address of the spammer to be auto whitelisted. Not
a good thing ! |
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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):
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| d)
Use the SpamPal Whitelist
Email Addresses page to manually
whitelist your email addresses: |
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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: |
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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
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| This completes
the installation and setup. |
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