Server Setup for VPOP3

VPOP3 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 VPOP3 mailboxes that are setup.

Quick Index

1. Install SpamPal

2. Configure SpamPal

3. Configure your VPOP3 Server

3.1 Change your POP3 settings
3.2 Create Filter/Message rules

4. Email Virus Scanners and Firewalls

5. Whitelist friends and contacts
5.1 Using the automatic SMTP Whitelist (example)

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.

Note: Ports already in use

If you are already running SpamPal and then install VPOP3 you may see an error box (for ports 110 and 25) like this:

This just means that you have to change the default SpamPal ports, as they are conflicting with VPOP3

If this installation is an upgrade of SpamPal then the existing configuration of VPOP3 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

Now change the Local Port Number to port 9110 (see screen below)

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 VPOP3 server to fetch your mail through the SpamPal proxy rather than directly from your ISP.

You need to know how you collect mail from your ISP, for example, if you use POP3 to collect your mail then you only need to change your POP3 settings.

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3.1 Change your POP3 settings

Go to the VPOP3 Settings page in VPOP3

Now, to reconfigure VPOP3, first make a careful note of your original settings.

You should append whatever value you currently have in your User ID setting, to whatever you currently have in the Username field (seperated with a @ sign), and change the Address setting to 127.0.0.1.

e.g. if your original values were:

Address: your.mailserver.com
User ID: fred.bloggs

then you would, for example, change them to:

Address: 127.0.0.1
User ID: fred.bloggs@your.mailserver.com

Now, make sure you change the PORT field to match the Local Port Number (port 9110) that you setup in SpamPal ealier.

The new setup should look like the screen below:

Note 1: If the server name already is localhost

Don't worry; just add @localhost to the username and leave the server name as is

Note 2: If your POP3 username already contains an @

continue regardless; SpamPal copes with usernames that contain two @s without difficulty.

Typical POP3 Server Examples (do not use directly)
Eg. 1: the original values of:	Eg. 1: should be changed to new values of:
Username: fred.bloggs	Username: fred.bloggs@mail.btopenworld.com
Incoming Mail (POP3) Server:mail.btopenworld.com	Incoming Mail (POP3) Server: localhost
Eg. 2: the original values of:	Eg. 2: should be changed to new values of:
Username: johnsmith	Username:johnsmith@pop3.west.cox.net
Incoming Mail (POP3) Server: pop3.west.cox.net	Incoming Mail (POP3) Server: localhost
Eg. 3: the original values of:	Eg. 3: should be changed to new values of:
Username: fax07734	Username: fax07734@pop.telus.net
Incoming Mail (POP3) Server: pop.telus.net	Incoming Mail (POP3) Server: localhost
Eg. 4: the original values of:	Eg. 4: should be changed to new values of:
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

Note 3: If you are using the RegExFilter Plugin

a) In order to get RegEx Filter to scan the whole message body of these emails, you will need to add the
command CHECKPREVIEW into the filters.dat file.

Strictly speaking, RegExFilter also checks messages that are received by the TOP command when CHECKPREVIEW is added to the rule file. Because of speed reasons RegExFilter does not check TOP received messages (message previews) by default

b) You will also need to go to the Connections options, bring up the POP3 port properties and set the amount
of message body to filter for Message Previews and for Full Message fetches to be the same value or perhaps increase both values a little

What happens is VPOP3 first fetches just the message preview (the first entry for the message in your logfile; as you can see, it's not marked as spam), stores the subject line from that, then fetches the message entirely - in the default setting SpamPal will look at more of the message, and in this case RegExFilter finds something further down the
message that causes it to be tagged as spam. However, VPOP3 then puts the subject line it fetched with the message preview onto the message, hence the problem you're seeing.

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3.2 Create Filter/Message Rules

If you want VPOP3 to automatically filter the SpamPal-marked messages into a separate VPOP3 Mailbox,
so that you can more easily review them, continue as follows.

a) Setup a new VPOP user, called SPAM

b) In the directory that you used to install VPOP3 (e.g.. C:\Program Files\VPOP3) you should have the download rules (or filters) that VPOP3 uses, when processing mail, called DLRULES.DAT.

If you want any Spampal detected messages to be moved to the SPAM Mailbox, so that the users don't seem them, then you need to add the following lines to the end of your DLRULES.DAT file:

+>spam%Redirect spam into the 'spam' mailbox
X-SpamPal: SPAM

c) Now any SPAM messages you receive will go to the SPAM Mailbox, for you to either View, Delete or Move into another VPOP3 Mailbox

Note: Download rules

a) Make sure you are using a version of vpop3™ higher than 1.4.6 beta

b) You can also change the download rule to filter on Subject, instead of the X-SpamPal header:

+>spam%Redirect spam into the 'spam' mailbox
Subject: **SPAM**

c) Sometimes vpop3 does not receiving the change of subject when using dlrules.dat and therefore does not put spam into the correct mailbox. This small program can be used as an external router to fix the problem. To download, go to the SpamPal plugins page and look for GlrRoute

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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.

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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.

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This is a walkthough on how to setup VPOP3 and SpamPal to use the automatic SMTP whitelist, which will whitelist any email address that your local lan user sends out via VPOP3.

The following IP addresses are used in this example:

192.168.42.1 Client PC on Local Lan
192.168.42.42 VPOP3 Server on Local Lan

The chain we need to end up with is:

192.168.42.1:25 (PC) -> 192.168.42.42:25 (SpamPal) >- 192.168.42.42:9025 (VPOP3) -> YourISP SMTP:25

Assuming you've already got SpamPal and VPOP3 working together to bring in POP3 email, you can now carry out the following setup.

First go to SpamPal's Lan Configuration page and change the IP Address that SpamPal listens on from it's default 127.0.0.1 to the IP Address that VPOP3 is running on, which in this example is 192.168.42.42

Now go to the Connections panel and select POP3 and click Properties.

Now click the Security tab and then hit the Access Control button.

Now click on the radio button Port has its own access control list and then enter 192.168.42.42 into the access list, in order to allow VPOP3 to access to SpamPal. So, you should now end up with a screen like this:

Now that SpamPal is setup for POP3 access using this new chain, you now need to setup SpamPal for automatic SMTP whitelisting, which will send out it's emails to VPOP3 on port 9025

So, go to the Connections panel and select SMTP (or add one if you don't have one) and click Properties.

Now make sure you change the Settings screen to look like this, ie. using 127.0.0.1 and port 9025:

Now click the Security tab and hit the Relay Permissions button. Now enter 192.168.42.1/24 which
will only allow Local Lan users to access SpamPal's SMTP Proxy.

Now you need to tell VPOP3's SMTP server to receive emails from SpamPal on port 9025.

So, go to the VPOP3 Settings screen, click Local Servers and change the SMTP Server port to 9025

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