FILTERING SPAM with Netscape 4.7x

What is SPAM? Spam is unsolicited e-mail, often of a commercial nature, sometimes off-color (pornography), sent indiscriminately to multiple mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups; in other words junk e-mail.

Lehigh’s IronMail virus scanner now has some advanced SPAM detection algorithms that can help identify a spam message and add "[SPAM]" to the beginning of the subject line so that you can set up filtering rules. This is not an exact science, so it is best to create a filter that moves the spam to a folder for perusal before deleting the messages.

When you create a message filter, it will move any message with ‘matched’ criteria to the folder you designate. It does not appear in your Inbox; it is moved directly to that folder. A problem may arise where you may eventually forget to check that folder and the messages continue to add up. It is advisable to create a folder to filter spam under the Local Mail directory, which resides on your hard drive and not under mail.lehigh.edu, which resides on the mail server where it will be counted against your mail quota. The following directions will instruct you how to create a mail filter for spam that will be placed in a folder under local mail.

Note: You can also set up your filter to send spam to your trash folder, but please scan the message subject lines before emptying the trash as some valid email may be marked as spam. If you have the system set to ‘empty trash on exit’, you may not remember to scan your trash before exiting and possibly lose a valid email.

To create a mail filter for SPAM in Netscape Messenger (Mail):

In mail (Messenger window), choose Message Filters from the Edit pull-down menu
In the Message Filters dialog box, click New

The Filter Rules dialog box appears. Enter the necessary information to specify filter settings.

Enter a Filter name (the example is named SPAM Filter)
To filter messages that contain [SPAM] in the subject of the message, enter [SPAM] as the keyword to be used.

Click the New Folder button to create a folder in which incoming messages will automatically be filed.

Enter a name for the new folder (the example is named SPAM Messages)
To create the new folder as a subfolder of Local Mail, click the down arrow to next to the field and select Local Mail
The Filter Rules dialog box should look like the example below, click OK.

The Message Filters dialog box will appear with the SPAM Filter listed

To log filter activity, which can help to debug filtering: Click the checkbox at Log Filter Use
To display filter log: Click View Log

Any incoming mail that is spam will be filtered to the folder you specified. To read filtered messages, simply open that folder in order to read the messages. If you find any messages which are not spam which you wish to save, right click on the message body, select Move Message, and then select the folder to which the message should be moved. To delete all remaining messages, click on the Subject field of any message in the message list, click Edit, Select, and then All Messages; hit the Delete key.