Preparing Mailboxes for use with antispamseeder.exe

Before a mailbox can be used by antispamseeder to create or alter the antispam-table.exe file, several precautions should be taken.

Mailboxes Messages should be Alike

Make sure that each mailbox contains the same type of e-mail messages. For example, one mailbox should contain only spam messages, and another mailbox should contain only non-spam messages.

Mailboxes should be the Same Size

Make sure that all mailboxes contain relatively the same number of e-mail messages. If one mailbox contains substantially more e-mail messages than the other, the word counts will be skewed and content filtering may not function correctly.

Remove Extra Text

You need to clean up all forwarded e-mail messages. Sometimes, a mailbox contains messages that were forwarded by a user (for example, the message was misidentified as spam or should have been identified as spam and the user wants it added to the good word counts). If this is the case, you will need to examine each forwarded e-mail and remove any information that was not included in the original e-mail, before using the mailbox with antispamseeder.exe. Information that needs to be removed is anything that was inserted by the user's e-mail client when the message was forwarded, such as the following:

• Message headers (i.e. To, From, CC , Date, Subject)
• Original message indicators ">"
• Anything that the user inserted into the e-mail including signatures, business cards and comments (for example, "This message was incorrectly identified as spam").

Failure to remove the above items may result in a inaccurate antispam-table.txt file, which will cause statistical filtering to incorrectly identify spam.