Magnets are a POPFile feature that lets you bypass the Bayesian filtering system. For example, you can set up a magnet that will put every message from a certain sender into a certain bucket.

You should use magnets with care. If you are just starting to use POPFile you may think that magnets are the way to go. But if you set up a magnet for everyone you communicate with, all those messages will bypass the Bayes engine and POPFile will never learn what a good message looks like. If you train POPFile, however, it will learn what words are used in the messages from your friends and if one of them gets a new email address (or if you win a new friend), POPFile will have no trouble at all correctly categorizing this piece of mail that your magnets never would have caught.

There are occasions where a magnet might actually help you, however. Suppose you are on a mailing list where spam is discussed. A message to that list might contain a complete spam mail and POPFile might thus have a hard time to tell whether all those spammy words actually make this a spam message or not. Another example are friends that send you spam. Some people won't listen and will always take care to forward you the latest hoax. You might want to magnetize the messages from those special friends. Or you might want to let POPFile hand you their good messages and tag the rest as spam.

There are several types of Magnets for Sender (From) and Recipient (To):

See also:

• Training POPFile
• Whitelists