Aggressive Spam Defense Tutorial

Aggressive Spam Defense has an efficient but unobtrusive built-in help system that will show you help and hints right within the user interface - where you need it the most.

There is also ample help available by double clicking the ? (question-mark) at the top right corner, as seen in the picture on the right.

This tutorial is also available in the local help-file.

How ASD works

First a quick overview of what makes ASD tick.

The core of Aggressive Spam Defense is based on spam indexes. It simply means that if an email has certain characteristics - such as a specific phrase, sender-address, attachment, etc. - each of them can add a configurable spam-index to that email. They are added up, and if the sum is over the spam-threshold, the email is treated as spam.

Depending on how much spam-index the email has accumulated, it is put in either the red, yellow or green category.

This makes a very easy to use and flexible system. You hardly ever have to touch the keyboard to operate ASD. To tune it to the kind of email that you receive, just click a button and drag a bar and ASD will adjust to your new settings.

In addition you have Force Delete. This mode of operation does not depend on spam-indexes. It works very simple. If an email is found containing an item marked as Force Delete in any of the spam-lists, it will be deleted without any further processing. This is a very targeted and accurate way of deleting spam.

When an email is deleted, it is deleted from the mail-server itself. This means that the email will never even touch your computer's hard drive. In addition to saving space on your computer, it also prevents your machine from accidentally being infected by an email-virus.

Colors are used throughout the user-interface to make things simpler and quicker to grasp. So whenever you encounter the red color you can assume it is associated with spam. The green color is associated with clean emails. And the yellow color is used in the suspicious/uncertain (or dodgy) situations.

Account setup and first line of defense

After ASD is first installed you need to set up your email accounts. If they were automatically detected you should normally just need to provide the password.

For an email account used for work it is advisable to drag the 3 bars Not to me, Multiple Recipients and Internal filter strength to a fairly low value. This is because you at work are more likely to receive emails from complete strangers.

For a personal account, leave these bars at the default value.

Make sure that the last column for each account is set to Color-code only. This mode of operation will never automatically delete any emails.

You can come back and change this to Force delete or Delete all spam later when you have tuned ASD to the kind of emails you receive. Following is a short description of the 4 account modes available.

All clean (AC): All emails are treated as clean and will be marked as such with a green color and a white heart next to it. This should be very useful in situations where you want to by-pass all spam-filters and only use the mail notification features of ASD.

Color-code only (CC): Every email is run through the filters and colored according to how much spam-index is accumulated. Emails are never automatically deleted.

Force delete (FD): All emails go through the spam-filters, but only those that have characteristics that are marked with Force delete in the spam-lists will be automatically deleted. All others will be colored according to the spam-index acquired. A great feature to prune your inbox substantially with ultimate control.

Delete all spam (DS): All emails that accumulate more spam-index than the threshold will be deleted - including those marked with Force delete. You will only see green and yellow emails listed. This is the most aggressive setting.

Ready to go

After you have set up your email accounts, click the pause/play button to start normal operation. Without any further interaction from you, ASD will at regular intervals poll your email accounts and investigate any emails to see if they resemble spam.

They will then be listed in ASD as green, yellow or red color depending on if they are found to be clean, suspicious or spam respectively. If any clean emails are found ASD will also notify you by showing a balloon-hint near the taskbar.

Also the taskbar icon will change to a number indicating what emails are waiting for you. The color of the number tells you what kind of emails are waiting.

If you are running an account in mode Delete all spam, you will never see any red emails listed for that account - they will be automatically deleted for you.

A log-file is then available so you can inspect what emails have been automatically deleted, and for what reason.

Add friends to the clean list

When you receive emails coming from friends and otherwise trusted contacts, click the green Q (quick add to clean list) to add the email address to the clean-list. All future emails you receive from this email address will then be listed as green with a white heart bext to it to indicate to you that it is from someone you know.

Multiple clean-lists exist. Many people for example subscribe to various newsletters or other regular mailings. These do not neccesarily come from the same email address every time. It could be for example that the subject-line or body of the email always contains a certain special word or phrase. Or the recipients address is always the same. In this situation you would of course add either the special word, or the recipients address to the clean-list.

Add junk to the spam list

If you receive a spam email that is not detected as such, you should update your spam-lists so similar emails will be detected and dealt with in the future.

The quick way of doing this is to click the red Q to rapidly add various attributes of the email to the spam list. You can also click the Add to spam-list button to explicitely add an attribute of your own choice that you know would identify the email as spam. You could also preview the email and add words and phrases from the body of the email to the spam-list.

Aggressive Spam Defense can run your email account in a special mode called Force delete. This mode is quite powerful since it gives you ultimate control over what emails to automatically delete.

In this mode, only emails with an attribute marked as Force delete in the spam-list will be automatically deleted. All other emails will go through normal spam processing and will be listed as green, yellow or red - even if it is found to be spam.

The most aggressive mode of operation is Delete all spam. In this mode all emails that are found to be spam will be automatically deleted. You will never find any red emails listed. Only use this mode after careful tuning ASD to the kind of emails you receive.