POPFile is more than a Spam filter, it can help you sort mail in to multiple categories, such as "spam", "work", "personal", "hobby".

POPFile uses Baysian Statistics to categorise your email. All you need to do is show it some examples of each type of mail, it extracts the text from them and works out which words occur most frequently. It can then analyse incoming mail and categorise it.

Of course, it won't be 100% correct, but reports of 96% or higher accuracies are common. My current accuracy is 99.2%, with 6 different categories.

POPFile isn't an email program, though you can use it to preview mail if you wish. It sits between your normal email program and your normal email source. POPFile doens't delete Spam, it labels your email. You can then set up a simple rule in your email program to either delete the spam or (preferably) put it into a spam folder where you can check it at your leisure.

Installing POPPFile on Windows is dead easy. It also work on Linux and other Operating Systems such as MAC.

POPFile security

POPFile's configuration is accessed through a webserver on your machine, and it also opens a port for your email program to connect to. However, POPFile has a number of security features built in, notably, by default it only allows access from your machine (localhost).

However, there's no reason not to secure it morem so you should:

• Change the default ports used (110 and 8080) to something random (e.g. 1538 and 7384)
• Configure your firewall to block access to these ports
• Set up a password in the POPFile security settings
• Ensure that you keep POPFile's default setting which only allows connections from the local machine.