![]() | The Anti-Spam Wizard |
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KMail doesn't have a built-in spam detection solution: the developers believe using external, but specialized, tools is the better approach. KMail uses these tools through its flexible filter architecture. The Anti-Spam Wizard helps you with the initial filter setup.
It will give you some choices about how you want the spam filtering to be set up. Afterwards it will automatically create the appropriate filter rules.
It can only initially set up the filters for you; and it will provide a standard setup. Modifying existing filters is not yet possible.
You can activate the wizard via Tools->Anti-Spam Wizard....
Here are the details of how the wizard works: KMail can use several external tools to detect spam messages; it will try to automatically find out which of those tools are installed on your box and will show you the result of the search for each tool. You can mark the tools which you want to be used by KMail to detect spam; marking tools which were not found is not possible because the appropriate checkboxes are disabled. Of course, you can close the wizard, install a tool, and restart the wizard again.
If you have marked at least one tool you will be able to select some actions to be done in KMail with regard to spam messages: to let KMail detect spam messages you definitely should mark the Classify messages using the anti-spam tools option; if you want messages detected as spam to be moved into a certain folder, please select the appropriate folder and mark the Move detected spam messages to the selected folder option; if messages detected as spam should additionally be marked as read, then mark the Additionally, mark detected spam messages as read option.
If you want to be able to manually mark messages as spam or non-spam (ham) you should check the Classify messages manually as spam option: note that you can seemingly achieve the same result when you only change the status of the appropriate messages; but, if any of the tools you selected support Bayesian filtering (i.e. a method to detect spam based on statistical analysis of the messages) then these messages are not only marked but additionally transfered to the tools to let them learn so they can improve their detection rate.
Having checked at least one of these last options will allow you to let the wizard finish the filter setup. The wizard will not take any existing filter rules into consideration but will append new rules in any case; you may want to inspect the result of this process in the Filter Dialog. If you have checked the Classify messages manually as spam / not spam option the wizard will create toolbar buttons for marking messages as spam or as ham; keep in mind that classifying messages as spam will also move those messages to the folder you had specified for spam messages.
The wizard uses information stored in a special configuration file named kmail.antispamrc (stored in the global or local KDE config directory). It will first check the global config file and then the local config file: if the local config file contains entries with higher (newer) version numbers per-tool the configuration data from the local file for that tool is used; that way, both administrators and users can update the wizard configuration.
The detection of spam messages is achieved by creating pipe through actions per-tool within a special filter. Another filter contains rules to check for detected spam messages and actions to mark them and (optionally, depending on the choice in the wizard) to move them into a folder. Both filters are configured to be applied on incoming messages and on manual filtering.
Two filters are needed for the classification of ham and spam. They contain actions to mark the messages appropriately. As mentioned above, the filter for classification as spam has another action to move the message into a predefined folder. If the selected tools support Bayesian filtering, the wizard will create additional filter actions to pass the messages to the tools (execute command actions) in the appropriate learn mode.
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