SpamBayes Outlook Plugin
A spam filter based on statistical
analysis of
your personal mail.
If you are new to SpamBayes, see Welcome
To Spambayes.
If you want to add the Spam field to your Outlook views, follow
these instructions.
If you need help configuring SpamBayes, see our Configuration Guide.
If you are having problems with SpamBayes, please see the Troubleshooting Guide.
Other links of interest
The main SpamBayes project page.
The online SpamBayes FAQ.
How to make a
donation.
Tips and Common Problems
Filtering in the background:
When Outlook is under load, SpamBayes may occasionally miss some
messages (as Outlook doesn't tell us they appeared). Also, if you
use builtin Outlook rules, you may find that occasionally they also
fail to filter messages (as both SpamBayes and the builtin rules
"fight" over processing the message). Both of these
problems can generally be solved by enabling background filtering of
messages, via the SpamBayes Manager's Advanced
tab.
Toobars stop working: Many
people report that occasionally the toolbars will stop working.
See the troubleshooting guide
for more details on how to fix this.
Toolbars remain after uninstall:
If you uninstall SpamBayes, the toobar items will remain when you next
start Outlook. You can delete the toolbar by right-clicking on
it, then selecting Customize. Our troubleshooting guide has alot
more information on toolbars.
Viewing and Using the Spam Score Field
A custom property named Spam
is added to all Outlook messages scored, but Outlook does not allow us
to automatically add this to your views. However, you can teach
Outlook to
display this field as a column in any table view, like the standard
Messages view.
This takes some work, and has to be done again for every folder in
which you want to display a Spam column - typically this will be all
folders you are filtering, and your Spam and Unsure folders.
Perform the following steps
- While looking at an Outlook table view (like Messages),
right-click on the line with column headers (From, Subject, To,
Received, ...). In the context menu that pops up, click on Field
Chooser. A box with title Field Chooser pops up.
- In the drop-down list at the top of the Field Chooser window, select User Defined Fields
- Below the drop-down, you should see a rectangular
button with a Spam label .
This should be automatically
created for
all folders managed by the system, but if it does not appear, you will
need to add it yourself. To do this, perform the following steps
- In the lower left corner of the Field Chooser
box,
click New.... A box with title New Field pops up.
- In the Name: box, type Spam.
- In the Type: dropdown list, select Percent.
This is the third choice in the dropdown list. Do not
select any other format -- it won't work.
- The Format: select the first entry in the list -
"Rounded". The Field Chooser should now look like the first image
on the right.
- Click OK in the New Field box. Now you're back in
the Field Chooser box, with a new Spam button shown, as the second
figure shows.
- Use your mouse to drag the Spam button to the column header
position where you want to see the Spam column. You don't have to be
precise here -- you can rearrange or resize the column later just by
dragging it around.
- You're done! Close the Field Chooser box.
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Creating the new field

The Field Chooser after creating the field.
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Outlook's standard Automatic Formatting features can also be taught how
to access the value of this field; for example, you could tell Outlook
to display rows with suspected spam messages in green italic. However,
for whatever reason, the Outlook Rules Wizard does not allow creating
rules based on user-defined fields. That's why this addin supplies its
own filtering rules.
Your help is needed!
This is free software. Please offer any help you are able
to. In particular, contributions to this documentation are
welcome! If you don't know where to start, please send a mail, indicating any
skills you may have we could use.