Using POPFile on Windows Platforms

You'll need several things to get started with POPFile on Windows.

• The latest POPFile release.

• An e-mail account that uses the POP3 protocol (most accounts do, although you can't use POPFile with web-based services like Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail without extra software. See Configuring Proxies & Firewalls).

• Approximately 7MB free disk space (or 13MB, if 'Nihongo' (Japanese) is selected) is required for the default installation created by the Windows installer.

• POPFile itself occupies about 4MB (including some Windows-specific files).

• POPFile is written in Perl so the installer installs a minimal version of Perl which occupies approximately 3MB.

• If 'Nihongo' (Japanese) is selected when installing POPFile additional disk space is required for the 'Nihongo' parser used to analyse the text. The installer offers a choice of three parsers: internal (built-in), Kakasi (the default parser, an extra 2.6MB) or MeCab (an extra 48.9MB). These parsers all require 3.4MB of additional Perl support (which is included in the installer).

• If the optional XMLRPC.pm module is installed, an additional 1.3MB of disk space is required (most of this is used by the extra Perl components required by the module).

• If the optional SSL Support is installed to allow POPFile to use SSL when connecting to a mail server, an additional 2.5MB of disk space is required for the extra Perl components and SSL libraries.

• For a complete installation with all of the optional modules (including SSL Support) selected, about 10.9MB (or between 14.3MB and 56.3MB if Japanese support is installed) is required.

• The word lists (called the corpus) used to classify your email will take some additional space depending on how much mail you use to train POPFile and how many buckets you create. POPFile keeps a temporary copy of recent mail (the Message History) for a few days to make it easy to correct any classification errors so some extra space is required for these recent messages. For some users only a few extra MB will be sufficient for the corpus and Message History, for others an additional 100 MB may be required.

1. Download the Windows installer from the POPFile Download Page.
   • Note: The installer for POPFile 1.1.1 (or later) no longer supports very old versions of Windows (see Support for old versions of Windows for further details)
2. Run setup.exe and follow the installation instructions. See Vista Compatibility page if using Vista.
   Note: If you've got an error “To install on the 'C' drive please select a folder location that does not contain spaces” in the installation process, please see the troubleshooting of this problem.
3. You can launch POPFile from the Start Menu (Start –> Programs –> POPFile –> RunPOPFile), or reboot and it will start automatically via a shortcut in the StartUp folder (if the automatic startup option was selected during the installation).
   Important note: In either case, nothing will appear on your screen! To check if it's running correctly, read the “Accessing POPFile” section below.
4. Configure your email client. See Configuring Specific Mail Clients.

• POPFile doesn't have a traditional interface like most programs - you access it through your web browser. Don't worry - unless you say otherwise, no-one outside your machine can access it.

• To load POPFile, go to [“http://127.0.0.1:8080”], or (for the Windows version) click on the 'POPFile User Interface' link in your Start Menu. Important note: if, during the Windows install process, you chose a different port to talk to POPFile on, replace the “8080” part with whatever you chose.

• If you get an error message, check that POPFile is really running, and that you have the port number correct (it should be 8080, but if you changed it, you'll also need to change that in the web address you're going to.)

You can make it easier to access POPFile by modifying your hosts file. For example, you could set it so that http://popfile:8080 would launch the POPFile UI by adding this line to your hosts file:

127.0.0.1	popfile

Note that on Windows systems you can use either space or tab characters to create the gap between 127.0.0.1 and popfile (do not use a mixture of spaces and tabs).

The default locations of your hosts file on Windows are:

Windows Vista  =   C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC
Windows XP     =   C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC
Windows 2000   =   C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC
Windows 98/ME  =   C:\WINDOWS

Of course, you can also create a bookmark for POPFile and some mail clients allow access to the POPFile UI within the mail client. See Access POPFile from within Outlook for an example.