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

Now you have set up SpamPal, you need to tell your Hamster 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 settings.

After Hamster has been started open the pull down menu Configuration and choose Mail: settings & server. Then click on pane POP3-Mailserver to have a list of existing - if any - mail server shown:

Now you have to press the button Edit to enter a Username and a Password.

In the field Username you have to add a @ at the end of the prior user name. After the @ you have to add the name of the POP3 mail server which had been entered into the field Servername before the installation of SpamPal.

After these changes you should see something like this:

Finally press OK to save all changes.

Now try to check your mailbox; if you don't get any errors, continue to the next step.

If you get an error from your Hamster, check that you've configured the incoming POP3 server to 127.0.0.1 or localhost and, if necessary, that the port has been set right.

If you have more than one POP3 mailbox, repeat this step for each of them.

Now you have two possibilities: either you edit the file mailfilt.hsc or you set up a filter in your email program.

Please refer to the others manuals if you want to filter using your email program

If you want to use Hamster for your filtering actions go on like this.

You have to add a line containing a filter action that either deletes or moves every message with the string X-SpamPal: SPAM to another account or folder.

For example, the following filter:

=set(spam) X-SpamPal: {^(?-i)SPAM\b}

will move all incoming spam marked by SpamPal to the local user spam. You might want to redirect it to another user or even have it killed by default ("=kill(spam)...").

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.

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

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):

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.