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System Requirements
You'll need several things to get started with POPFile on Windows.
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).
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).
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.
Installation
-
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.
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.
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Accessing POPFile
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.)
Access tip
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
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
Win 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.