jwSpamSpy – Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Version 11.0910; last updated 2011-09-10 |
You can purchase a license and activate it any time the product is installed, or after uninstalling and reinstalling it. Uninstalling and reinstalling does not change the original expiry date, you can not pause or extend the evaluation period by doing so.
It is preferable to purchase the license before the evaluation period finally expires because during this period the license will be automatically activated, provided the email used for the purchase is one that is filtered by jwSpamSpy.
Unregistered evaluation version (expiry date: 2005-12-31)If you're using the registered version (i.e. you have purchased and installed a license key) then your name and purchase date should appear, for example:
Jane Doe (Jane's Widget Inc. ) [2005-05-27] jane.doe@myisp.com
If you run a business, you will constantly receive sales enquiries and orders from people whose addresses you had never seen before and whose addresses by definition are not whitelisted. If some of these emails were trashed, you would lose valuable business. That is simply not acceptable.
Protecting valid emails from non-whitelisted sources is a top priority for us. It is more important than catching as much spam as possible (where we do pretty well anyway). The vast majority of valid emails will get delivered by jwSpamSpy without any interference. A small percentage, maybe 1% in our own email traffic, will however be flagged as suspicious (i.e. likely spam) because of various observations made by the filter that match spam profiles. If a valid message has some problems with it, it is usually only flagged and then delivered, but not deleted.
Messages flagged as suspicious are a grey area between clearly spam and clearly valid messages that need human inspection. In our filter we try to keep this portion as small as possible, so as not to require too much of your time. You can set up filter rules in your mail client (e.g. Outlook Express) to sort these into a separate folder that you then inspect maybe once a day. Most of the suspicious messages will be spam, but if one should turn out to be valid mail, it can easily be retrieved. If you expect the sender may write to you again in the future then you should whitelist the sender address.
If you are using Outlook Express you can also take your entire address book, export it to a text file and then import it into the sender whitelist. That ensures that all the people who you have previously replied to or who you manually added to the address book can send you mail without any problems. This is how you do it:
Go to Outlook Express and use "File" / "Export" / "Address Book" / "Text File (comma separated values)" / "Export". Select a file name. Uncheck all fields but the email address, then click "Finish".
Then open the jwSpamSpy dialog, select "Tools" / "Email addresses" / "Whitelist" / "Import file". Browse to the folder where you saved the ".csv" export file and select it, then click "Open". Wait until the file has been loaded, then click "Apply" and "Close". All these addresses will have been added to your personal whitelist and will never be flagged.
While any mails are in the suspect folder(s), jwSpamSpy displays a tooltip message "Please check pending suspect mails" when you move the mouse to the system tray icon. To review the pending mails, click on the icon with your right mouse button and select "Suspect mails". After you select the mail account that has the pending mails, a Windows Explorer window will open that shows the quarantaine folder. You can now open any mail files one by one and check their contents. If you don't want one, just the delete the file. If you do want to recover one file, follow these steps:
Netscape and Mozilla and some other email clients do not allow you to drag attached emails to an email folder. With these clients you can save the attachment as a file in a specific folder that exists for your mail account (jwSpamSpy version 1.00.050705 and later). Normally the path of this folder is
Note: If you see a message "OE removed access to the following unsafe attachments in your mail:
Tools | Options | Security | Virus Protection
"Do not allow attachments to be opened or saved that could potentially be a
virus" (uncheck this)
Blocking access to attachments in Outlook Express 6.0 is a cheap way for Microsoft to stop the spread of viruses. However, it's very crude, over the top and quite intrusive. With this option, you can't even open photographs that you've been sent! We do recommend that you re-enable access to attachments. Since jwSpamSpy filters most viruses, it is quite safe to do so.
This should not happen very often. If it does you can contact us so we can address the problem.
The original message is attached to the notification and can be retrievd. See here for details.
If a valid (non-spam) email is flagged as suspicious and you receive mail from that source regularly, we recommend you whitelist the sender address (Tools | Email addresses | Whitelist). Emails from whitelisted senders are never flagged as suspicious.
In addition, you can forward a copy of the non-spam message to support@jwSpamSpy.com. We will try to improve our product so that in future mails like this one will pass through. Please make sure to forward the mail as an attachment, so that all email headers remain intact. In Outlook Express, use "Message | Forward as attachment". A regular "Forward" does not provide us with sufficient information about the message that showed the problem.
Filtered mail for every mail account is saved to a folder on your hard disk where it can be retrieved any time:
If you don't want to take up disk space, it's OK to delete the *.eml files in the spam folder any time.
then click OK. Navigate in the left pane to the following key:regedit
The quickest way of changing the IP address for the local mailboxes is to
use RegEdit.
Go to "Start / Run" and type
then click OK. Navigate in the left pane to the following key:regedit
at a DOS prompt and look for the value of "Host name". After you change the registry setting for Pop3Host you need to restart the Spamfilter. Right-click on the jwSpamSpy system tray area icon and select "Restart".ipconfig /all
If you wish to change the default from 10 minutes to something shorter or longer you can do that using the following procedure. Note that some ISPs do not like their mailboxes to be polled too often. They return intermittent errors if a mailbox is accessed too frequently. They do this to discourage excessive use of their resources.
To change the interval (for example, to every 5 minutes), use RegEdit.
Go to "Start / Run" and type
then click OK. Navigate in the left pane to the following key:regedit
After you change the registry setting for Pop3Interval you need to restart the Spamfilter for the setting to take effect, otherwise it won't take effect until you next restart your computer. Right-click on the jwSpamSpy system tray area icon and select "Restart".Pop3Interval REG_SZ 5
Webmailers such as Yahoo or Hotmail are email systems that are primarily designed for being accessed via an Internet browser. jwSpamSpy is designed primarily for email accounts used with email clients such as Outlook Express or Microsoft Outlook.
If you would like to use the webmail interface to read mail then you need to make sure non-spams are not picked up and moved to the local machine but are left in the webmail box. To do that, go to your mailbox settings in the jwSpamSpy main dialog. Change the setting for "Access mode" to "Delete or Preview". If you only ever read your emails in Outlook Express or another email client you can leave the Access mode as "Pickup, Delete or Preview".
You can use jwSpamSpy with webmailers provided one of the following is true:
There is no general rule whether webmail accounts directly support pop access. For example, Gmail / Googlemail and www.gmx.net provide POP3 access, but Hotmail does not. Yahoo.com accounts only have POP access if you purchase the Yahoo! Mail Plus option. Certain other free Yahoo accounts (e.g. yahoo.co.uk) can have POP access if you sign up to receive offers from Yahoo by email.
If your email account does not provide POP access you may still be able to use jwSpamSpy by combining it with third party products that provide POP access to webmail accounts that normally don't have it, such as Hotmail.com. Two such products are Web2Pop and Webmail Retriever. Here are some email providers supported by Web2Pop (according to their website):
POP access utilities for webmail accounts typically listen to port 110 on IP address 127.0.0.1, as does jwSpamSpy in its default configuration. Make sure you configure at least one of the two products for a different port number (e.g. 1110) or a different IP address (e.g. 127.0.0.3). For example, Web2Pop could pick up mail from Hotmail and provide it to jwSpamSpy by listening to port 1110. Then jwSpamSpy would be configured to pick up mail from IP 127.0.0.1, port 1110 and would provide to Outlook Express by listening at port 110, IP address 127.0.0.1. Outlook Express would be configured to pick up mail from from IP 127.0.0.1, port 110.
Gmail and the latest version of AT&T Yahoo! Mail are different from other email providers because the POP interface they provide is only available via secure (SSL-encrypted) connections on port 995. Other email providers use port 110 and don't require encrypted connections. Currently jwSpamSpy does not directly support POP via encrypted connections, but it will work with Stunnel, a free third party on-on. Please follow these instructions:
1) If you have any old Windows PC in your office then it is possible to use it to filter email on behalf of any POP3 based client, from Mac OS via Linux to Solaris. This is because our filter acts as a POP3 client to the mail server and as a POP3 server to the mail client. The only requirement is that the filtering machine runs Windows and has LAN connectivity to both the mail server and mail client (i.e. has a network card). Of course it needs to be powered up when the client computer wants to access email. Our hardware requirements are not very high, basically any five year old low end Windows machine will do (Pentium MMX, Celeron 300, etc).
2) If you run your own mail server on a Linux box, you can use SpamAssassin to score incoming mails and set your Apple or Linux mail client to query that score and file the mail accordingly.
3) You can use an external service such as http://spamfence.net/ to filter the incoming account and have the mail forwarded to a secret, clean account that your client reads.
I like your product! Can I help sell it and earn a percentage?
Yes you can! We currently pay 20% of the net revenue (about $5 per copy) for every license sold to a customer following a link from your site. To become an affiliate and receive HTML code to put on your website, sign up here.
If this does not resolve your problem, you may contact us. It can be helpful if you provide the following information:
How to send us screen shots
Display the email application account settings or whatever you need to show to us on your screen. Then push the "Print Screen" key on your keyboard. You can now paste the screen content to a bitmap file using a program such as Paint ("Start | Programs | Accessories | Paint | Edit | Paste | File | Save As"). Attach this file to your email.
How to send us POP debug information
jwSpamSpy supports an option to log all activity between the mail program and the local mailbox. This should help us diagnose any incompatibilities that may exist between certain mail programs and our mailbox server. This feature is disabled by default. Here is how you turn it on.
C:\Program Files\JoeWein\SpamSpy\logs\pop-debug.txtIt contains a log of all the commands the mail program sent to the local POP server and information about when connections were made or broken. Since this also includes the passwords sent by your program, you may want to use search and replace in a text editor on this file to change passwords to asterisks or something else before you email it to us. After you have created and mailed the file, you may disable debugging again by deleting the Pop3Debug key via regedit.
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