This is yMail's scanner screen. In this image you can see 6 emails waiting to be downloaded from the server. The first five have been identified as spam and the last is clear. If any of the five spam emails aren't spam, you just select them (ctrl+click) then right-click and choose 'mark as not junk' from the popup menu. By marking junk and not junk before you even download mail, you're training your filters to recognise spam and good mail in future.
When you click the Red lightning bolt, any emails in orange will be deleted from your mail server, without you ever having to download them. The remaining emails can be retrieved by yMail, or by your regular email program. If you click the green lightning bolt the program will rescan your mail with the updated filters.
In this screenshot we can see three emails which yMail thinks might be spam. (This is common when you first start using the program, because the spam database is still in build mode.) If they're spam, just highlight them and mark them as such. If you don't mark them they will be downloaded, but save to your 'SpamBayes' folder (assuming you're using yMail as your email client.)
If you right-click an email in the scanner window you can choose to view the 'Bayes Breakdown' - a list of word in the header, sorted by their spamminess quotient. At the foot of the list you'll see the '0.99' scores - these are words which have only ever appeared in your spam, making them certain red flags. (yMail does all this automatically - all you have to do is tell it which mails are spam and which aren't.)
This is where you can set up the Bayes filtering options. For example, how many times a word must appear to be included in the database. (A setting of '1' includes everything.) The '65' and '95' settings are the levels at which emails will be regarded as possible spam and definite spam. 'Number of significant words' is the number of words used to determine an email's spamminess value. A higher number leads to more accurate filtering, but you'll get a lot more 'possible spam' results instead of straight out 'spam' You can always experiment.
yMail's message window. Here you can create folders for your mail, read messages in the preview window, drag and drop mails between folders and set up inbound mail filters.
yMail warns you before you open attachments. It will also refuse to open executable files.
You can now import your contacts into yMail, using a standard CSV file.
This reminder program of mine is integrated into yMail. As a bonus, when integrated with yMail it will email reminders to a given address.
Remember, this is beta software. I'm using as my only mail client, but that doesn't mean it will work perfectly for you. As an aside, the file extension used by yMail is 'EML', which means you can drag messages from your message store folder straight into Outlook Express (and vice versa) to transfer mail between the programs.
Disclaimer: I can't accept responsibility for lost data - There is no substitute for having backups.
