Controlling Unsolicited Email

Unsolicited email, or spam, is inevitable. Sending email is so inexpensive that even if 1 in 100,000 emails creates a sale, spammers feel it's worth it. And once your email address is on a list, it stays there.

Today, the best way to manage spam is to attempt to recognize unsolicited messages and treat them differently than legitimate email. This is a tricky process, because spammers disguise their emails to look like regular messages.

Using Your Address Book

The first strategy is to identify friendly messages - chances are, people you know are not sending you spam.

ATPmail Pro uses your address book to identify and sort incoming email. Each address book entry can be assigned a category with a color code and a folder (optional). The color is a visual clue, showing you which emails are from contacts in your address book and which aren't.

The folder sorts email as it arrives, and a popup message will tell you which folders new mail is in. Folder sorting can be used as a white-list, putting mail from unknown senders into a separate folder, or can be used to separate mail into many categories like friends, work, and online purchases.

Adding People To Your Address Book

Since the address book is so important, ATPmail Pro provides several built-in functions to make managing your address book easy. Whenever you send an email, the recipients' email addresses are automatically added to your address book if needed. Plus, you can right-click on any message in your mailbox and select "Add/Edit Address Book Entry". If the sender of the email is found in your address book, their information will be pulled up and made available for editing. If the sender is not in your address book, a new entry will be created, based on their email address, and made available for editing.

X-Ray Detector For Spam

You don't want to pass over a friendly email, but you don't want to open potential spam either. Besides being offensive, spam can tell the sender that you opened their mail. This is done using an HTML email with an embedded image. When your mail reader contacts the sender's server to get the image, they know you read their email. Now they know you exist, and you're bound to get a lot more spam from them.

ATPmail's "View Raw Email" feature allows you to read a message without triggering any events. Simply right-click on the message and select "View Raw Email". This will display the contents in pure text - no HTML, no images, no attachments. All headers will be displayed as well.

Integrated SpamAssassin Support

SpamAssassin(tm) is an open-source mail filter used to identify spam. It uses a wide range of heuristic tests on mail headers and body text to identify spam. SpamAssassin is a free utility, easily installed and configured on most systems.

ATPmail Pro integrates tightly with SpamAssassin, providing two significant advantages over other systems. First, ATPmail doesn't scan incoming mail from senders in your address book. This saves considerable processing power since most mail will come from known senders. Processing every message against hundreds of rules can be a big drain on your server. Second, ATPmail can scan email from external POP accounts. With most setups, only the mail managed by that server will be checked, but with ATPmail, all of your incoming mail is checked.

Integrating ATPmail Pro With Nearly Any Other Software

ATPmail can integrate with any spam-detection software that inserts headers into the email. ATPmail makes this possible using custom mail filters. You can set up a mail filter based on any header in the email. For instance, if the tool you use adds the special header "X-Spam-Test: SPAM" to all spam, then you can write a filter that searches for this header and either deletes the mail or moves it to a designated folder.