SpamAssassin + Outlook 2003

For clients whose e-mail accounts are hosted by DigitalCove Interactive, the following is a guide to configuring Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2003 to handle e-mail messages which have been positively identified as spam via SpamAssassin.

Note that these instructions may work for other versions of Outlook, but this has not been confirmed.

1. Open Outlook
2. Select the menu option "Tools -> Rules and Alerts...":
   
3. You should see a new dialog window open titled "Rules and Alerts". From within this window, in the "Email Rules" tab click on the "New Rule..." button:
   
4. You should see a new dialog window open titled "Rules Wizard". From here, select the "Start from a blank rule" radio button, make sure "Check messages when they arrive" is selected, and click the "Next" button at the bottom.
   
5. On the next page of the Rules Wizard, in the top section marked "Step 1: Select condition(s)", click on the checkbox for "with specific words in the message header", but do not click the "Next" button:
   
6. In the bottom section marked "Step 2: Edit the rule description", click on the link which reads "specific words":
   
7. A small dialog window will open with the title "Search Text". In the first text box, type in "X-Spam-Flag: YES", and click the "Add" button:
   
8. Click the "OK" button in the "Search Text" window.
9. Click the "Next" button in the "Rules Wizard" window.
10. On the next page of the Rules Wizard, in the top section marked "Step 1: Select condition(s)", click on the checkbox for "move it to the specified folder", but do not click the "Next" button:
    
11. In the bottom section marked "Step 2: Edit the rule description", click on the link which reads "specified".
12. A new dialog window will open with a list of e-mail folders. Select "Junk E-mail" and clock "OK":
    
13. Click the "Next" button in the "Rules Wizard" window.
14. On the next page of the Rules Wizard, give the new rule a name (we've used "SpamAssassin" here for convenience to identify that it uses the SpamAssassin header), make sure the checkboxes for "Run this rule now on messages already in Inbox" and "Turn on this rule" are selected, optionally confirm that the rule looks like the image below, and finally click the "Finish" button:
    

The new rule should run right away, and should automatically now be applied to any inbound e-mails.

It is important that you realise that not 100% of all spam will be identified! SpamAssassin uses a scoring method to determine the likelihood of an e-mail being spam - you may occasionally find an e-mail which has scored 4.7 in the spam level - since a score needs to be 5.0 before it can be considered undoubtedly spam, such a message would still get through to your Inbox.