I get a lot of spam e-mail. These days, however, most of it doesn't go to my e-mail Inbox, because I'm filtering my e-mail with SpamProbe. SpamProbe is a spam detector; you train it to recognize what you consider to be spam. It builds databases of keywords from your e-mail messages and then uses the keyword databases to decide whether incoming e-mail messages are spam.

In this article I explain how to set up SpamProbe to intercept spam e-mails and file them into a folder named Spam. If you prefer, you also may set it up to delete these messages. The setup I describe enables spam checking on a per-user basis, and users control which of their messages are considered to be spam. The setup is completely server-based and thus works with any e-mail client. Users need to understand only how to move messages from one mail folder to another.

Because it handles spam completely on the server, SpamProbe is great for users who must access their mail over a slow link, such as a modem. Client-based filters must download all the mail, spam and non-spam alike, while a server-based filter can keep all the spam on the server.

The setup described in this article works with any trainable spam filter, not only SpamProbe.

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