======How to write your own spam filter rules======

VPOP3's spam filter uses a basic scripting language designed for filtering email messages, so a full description of writing your own rules would be very long and complex, as it is really something that only a programmer should do.

For a technical reference, see our [[reference:spam_filter_rules|Spam Filter Rules documentation]].


A basic thing that people might want to do is to filter on a phrase, you could do this simply by editing the 'spamrules_userchecks.txt' file in the VPOP3 directory, use something like:

<code>
BulkScan Score [MyTests]
Subject "subject words" 100
Body "this is a message body phrase to check for" 100
AnyText "this is something to check for in the subject OR body" 100
EndBulkScan
</code>

If you just have the text to search for, then VPOP3 will do a simple substring match. For more flexibility you can use regular expressions, and surround the regex pattern in '/' characters. VPOP3 uses PCRE regexes. If the search text or regular expression contains spaces, then you need to surround the search expression with " quotes.

eg

<code>
BulkScan Score [MyTests]
Subject /subject\s+words/i 100
Body /this\s+is\s+a\s+message\s+body\s+(phrase|sentence)\s+to\s+(check|test)\s+for/i 100
AnyText /this\s+is\s+something\s+to\s+check\s+for\s+in\s+the\s+subject\s+(?i:OR)\s+body/ 100
Body "/this is a regular[- ]expression with spaces in/i" 100
EndBulkScan
</code>