Introduction

I was tired of purchasing Anti-Spam software which all failed one way or another.  One of them was way too slow, another one often classified friend E-mails as spam. Some were difficult to use, others had a so poor interface it was a pity, and I was spending too much time fighting Spam everyday even with these tools.

If you are using Microsoft Outlook as your mail client software, AntiSpam 1.0 for Outlook should help you easily eliminate 90% or more of all the junk and spam E-mails you receive every day. This first version does not use for now any sophisticated engine such as Bayesian Networks to detect bad E-mails, but simply relies on you classifying "keywords" as friend or spam keywords. So it is pretty simple to use and lets you quickly teach the software how to detect spam E-mails.  You always stay "in control" and at any time can easily reclassify any keyword from "spam" to "friend" or vice versa.

I have been using it for a few months and it has correctly classified more than 92% of the about 10000 E-mails I have received since I started to use it.  More importantly it has only once classified a friend E-mail as a spam out of these 10000 E-mails. And in any case all spam E-mails are moved to an Outlook AntiSpam folder so they are not lost, in case this happens again one day.

This software is free.  It is delivered with no guarantee whatsoever and is used at the user own risks.  However I don't think there is any risk!  It has been tested in several MS Outlook environments, but is not guaranteed to work fine in all MS Outlook environments.  It won't damage anything though.

AntiSpam 1.0 for Outlook may be uninstalled at any time.

This is an APL+Win 5.0 Runtime application entirely written with APL+Win Objects™ 6.0.

Requirements

• Microsoft Outlook
• Have your E-mail account correctly setup under Outlook

(AntiSpam 1.0 for Outlook has only been tested with Outlook 2002 and Outlook 2003)

Installing AntiSpam 1.0 for Outlook

Click on the link at the top of this page to download AntiSpam10Setup.exe and run it.  Answer the few questions (installation directory, etc).

Uninstalling AntiSpam 1.0 for Outlook

If you have used AntiSpam 1.0 for Outlook, there may be a new Tray icon displayed at the bottom right of your Windows screen. It is called ClickYes and should display ClickYes Running when your mouse hovers it. If you find it, just right click it and select Exit. You should do this BEFORE uninstalling AntiSpam 1.0 for Outlook, otherwise the AntiSpam directory will not be removed on your hard disk an the clickyes.exe file will remain.

Then select Start/All Programs/AntiSpam/Uninstall AntiSpam

How it works

1. start Microsoft Outlook
2. start AntiSpam (from Start/All Programs/AntiSpam/AntiSpam or from the desktop AntiSpam icon)
3. click the Outlook Send/Receive button to get your E-mails
4. in the AntiSpam window
   - the first time you use AntiSpam, start by clicking the Address Book button to make AntiSpam to transfer your Outllok Contacts Email addresses to AntiSpam
   - click on the Get Unread Msgs button and use the Next/Previous/First/Last button, if you want, to navigate through your Unread messages to look at them
   - then click the Move All Spam to Spam Folder button
     (this will move all E-mails detected as Spam from your Inbox to the AntiSpam folder: note that the Outlook AntiSpam folder is created the first time you click on this button)

Here is the interface:

When you click on Get Unread Msgs, all E-mails you have just received in Outlook, but not yet read in Outlook, are instantaneously transfered to AntiSpam.

You can use the First/Last/Previous/Next button to navigate through them and inspect them. Note that you see both the name of the Sender and his/her E-mail.

As you navigate through messages, you see that keyword grid displays keywords which are automatically checked as "friends" or "spam": this is because AntiSpam is delivered with a keyword database. More on that below.

When you click on Move All Spam to Spam Folder, all E-mails automatically detected as Spam are moved from the Outlook Inbox folder to the Outlook AntiSpam folder: this is pretty fast.

As this is done, statistics about the number of

• processed messages
• messages detected as friends
• messages detected as spam
• messages which AntiSpam fails to detect

are displayed. Also displayed is the overall level of recognition by AntiSpam for this group of unread messages:

Then, if the Recognition level is not 100%, this means you are left with a few messages which AntiSpam has not been able to classify.  In that case, use the navigation button to identify them.

When you have reached one, this is when you can teach AntiSpam to recognize it as Spam or Friend the next time.

Important keywords for this message are displayed in a grid with check boxes next to them and you may check the check box next to any such keyword (or keyword combination).

• Check it in the Friends check boxes column if you recognize the keyword as a friend keyword
• Check it in the Spam check boxes column if you recognize the keyword as a spam keyword

When you check a keyword, the software update the Statistics it displays about the number of keywords already recorded in the AntiSpam keyword dictionnary:

Keywords are classified as:

• spam keywords found in the From field
• spam keywords found in the From(Email) field
• spam keywords found in the Subject field
• spam keywords found in the Email body
• friend keywords found in the From field
• friend keywords found in the From(Email) field
• friend keywords found in the Subject field
• friend keywords found in the Email body

AntiSpam comes with a keywords database that has worked fine for me. It could be that some of the keywords which classify an Email as Spam for me is not right for you: when a message with this keyword automatically checked in AntiSpam, just uncheck it and you have taught AntiSpam to never use this keyword again to classify a message as Spam.  This is really easy and very flexible. You'll quickly make AntiSpam work fine for you.

It sometimes happens that some keywords are automatically checked in both columns (friends and spam): this may happen because spammers are clever and for example include your Email address in the message subject or body.  If you have instructed AntiSpam to consider your Email address as a friend keyword and if the message also contains spam keywords, then you have keywords checked in both columns.

In such a case, AntiSpam does NOT move the message to the AntiSpam folder. It leaves the responsability to do it to you.

When such a message is displayed just click the Move This Msg To Spam Folder to move it now to the AntiSpam folder.

So, move through all the messages which were not recognized by AntiSpam, if any, and check either friend or spam keywords. When you reached the last message, click the Move All Spam To Spam Folder again to move all those you have marked as Spam to the AntiSpam folder.

For performance reasons, we are not trying to detect keywords or keyword combinations within the message body, except the first message body phrase if it is short enough. We are only automatically detecting Web Site addresses within the Email body since these are often indications allowing to detect the Email as Spam.

However you can highlight any word or group of words within the message body and then click the Add Body Keyword button: the word or group of words will be added to the keywords grid and marked as Spam keywords. If you wanted them to be friend keyword(s), uncheck Spam and check Friend.

The Empty AntiSpam Folder button at the bottom right of the interface is self explanatory: when you click it all messages found in the Outlook AntiSpam folder are moved to the Outlook Deleted Items folder.

This shows the Microsoft Outlook 2003 folders before and after the Empty AntiSpam Folder button is clicked

At any time you may want to display history AntiSpam Statistics: just click on the  toolbar button or select the Statistics/AntiSpam Statistics menu item.

The keywords grid will be temporarily replaced with a grid similar to this one:

This shows you day after day, a summary of your AntiSpam Statistics.  It shows you here my current overal Recognition level of 92.32%.

Conclusion

AntiSpam 1.0 for Outlook is delivered on an as is basis.  I plan to improve it in the future.  It is free software and I hope it will be useful to you. For now it would help me if you reported to me any problem encountered or any suggestions so that I could improve it.