Quick Start Guide: Setting Up Your Email Program

POPFile works as a proxy server. Your email program talks to POPFile, which talks to your email server on its behalf. Instead of your email program getting messages directly, POPFile grabs them first, and scans them to decide what bucket they should go into.

Once it's decided - which takes only fractions of a second - POPFile marks the email with the bucket name. POPFile has two ways to mark email messages:

  • Adding a tag (e.g. [personal]) to the start (or end) of the subject line
    • This method allows email programs that allow only simple filtering to move your email based upon POPFile's classification (e.g. a filter can be used to move all mail marked [personal] to a folder reserved for personal email).
  • Adding a new email header (e.g. X-Text-Classification: personal)
    • This new header can be used by advanced email programs to filter email messages. This method has the advantage of leaving the subject line unchanged.

Normally only one of these methods will be used but POPFile can be configured to modify the subject line and insert a new email header.

However, you need to do two things to get your email program talking to POPFile:

  1. Adjust your email program's settings to make it talk to POPFile, and
  2. set up your email filters so that things get filed properly.

Let's adjust the mail settings first. We'll set up filters in a moment.

The Windows version of POPFile's installer will offer to change these settings for you for some common email programs. The installer can only change the POP3 server and the account user name (as described below) - if you have accounts that require Secure Password Authentication you should configure them manually (see below).

For every suitable account the installer finds, it will offer to reconfigure it for you. To reconfigure an account click the appropriate checkbox and click 'Next'. The installer will display the changes it is about to make and ask for permission to change the settings (if you click 'No' then no changes are made). If any account settings are changed the installer saves the original settings so they can be restored if POPFile is uninstalled.

The installer can only change accounts which belong to the user running the installer. After installation, if another user wants to use POPFile the 'Add POPFile User' wizard makes it easy to configure that user's email accounts. This wizard can also be run at any time to configure extra accounts for use with POPFile.

Below are links to instructions for some popular email programs. For others - or for advanced users - here are the general instructions:

  • Change the POP3 server name in your email client to 127.0.0.1, noting the original address.
  • Change the POP3 user name to [original-POP3-server-address]:[username]
  • Leave the password alone.

For accounts using Secure Password Authentication, see Using POPFile with Secure Password Authentication.

For accounts using APOP or SSL, see Does POPFile support APOP? or Can I use POPFile if I want to use SSL connections to my server?.

Direct links to a few popular client's specific instructions:

Okay. Now we've done that, it's time to set up your mail filters, so that once POPFile has done its work, your email program can take that and put everything in the right folder. You may have already done this step if you followed the instructions for your mail client.

If your email client will allow you to filter on new headers you have the option to modify the subject line to add a [classification] tag or not. It's near the top of the Buckets tab in the web UI and has to be set for each of your buckets. No matter which option you choose, the X-Text-Classification header is still added.

Just choose your email program and follow the instructions. While these instructions might look complicated, they should only take a couple minutes. It's hard to go wrong but just in case its always best to make a note of your original settings in case you need to go back.

Direct links to a few popular client's specific filter instructions:

That's all there is to it!… but…

Despite all this, POPFile still won't filter mail right now. Why not? It doesn't know what any of the buckets you entered mean. It has no idea what 'spam' and 'genuine' mean, or what 'work' and 'personal' are. It doesn't even know what language your e-mail is in - and it doesn't care. You must teach it to distinguish spam from regular email, or one project from another. You do this through training - our next step.

 
quickstart/clients.txt · Last modified: 2014/03/24 13:28 by 127.0.0.1

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