Anti-Spam Ver 12.0, Outlook 2007: Does Not filter anything after a week of training

[indinfer]

I have All Access. I installed the Anti-Spam for Outlook 2007 SP3 (part of Office Professional 2007). I see in Outlook the McAfee Anti-Spam toolbar. The toolbar has five buttons: Mark as Spam, Mark as Not Spam, Add to Friends List, Add Outlook Contacts to Friends List, and View Settings. I have the setting of Aggressive. So for about a week (which amounts to over a hundred emails a day, or nearly a thousdand emails) I have been training Anti-Spam. I train Anti-Spam by selecting emails which I consider spam and click on Mark as Spam. Whenever I click on Mark as Spam, the email subject is marked [SPAM] and moves to the McAfee Anti-Spam folder in Outlook, as I would expect and as I like.

However, I have never seen an email automatically go to McAfee Anti-Spam. And I would have thought that the Anti-Spam would have some automation to it. I would have thought that incoming spam would automatically be marked [SPAM] and go to the McAfee folder. Yet I see the same spam emails every day still go to the Inbox and are not marked [SPAM] even though I have trained McAfee Anti-Spam several times on these same emails.

Is the Anti-Spam supposed to do anything automatically? Is the Anti-Spam supposed to be just a slightly more convenient way for me to manually scan all emails and move the spam out of the Inbox?

[mqsuser]

You do not have to train McAfee Anti-Spam. AS automatically detects the message based on the McAfee AS settings whether the mail should be marked as SPAM or not spam.

Looks like the message which you are marking as SPAM ,McAfee AS is not treating those messages as spam messages.

You can try the following steps and see if it works.

Click on View Settings

Open the settings page

Go to Custom Filtering Rules

Define filter rules and see if that works for you and it filters the appropriately.

Let me know if this works.

[indinfer]

The custom filtering rules seems to work. The regular expressions is really nice concept. However, I do not see any explanation of the regex elements and what they mean and how they work. Would be a nice touch if McAfee would provide a link to a regex chart for people like me who were not born altready knowing how to talk, to read, to write, and to compose regex.

I am wondering what clicking the "Mark as Spam" and "Mark as Not Spam" buttons are supposed to do. Do they influence anything in the McAfee filter? Or are they just a convenience to move email between the Inbox and McAfee Anti-Spam.

In any case, I am greatful for your pointing me to the custom filtering. I think I can make that work for my filtering.

Thank you.

[mqsuser]

You can look into the help file about how to use the "Using Custom filters" for using regular expressions. or you can Google about it.

Yes, when you are marking mails as "Mark as Spam" and "Mark as Not Spam", AS analyzes these mails and update the filtering rules.

Good to know that filtering is working for you.

[indinfer]

I clicked on "Learn more" and also on "Help" and get to the same Help system. I did not see anything about how to compose regular expressions in Help. I just see that regular expressions is mentioned.

In the Help Index, I saw now entry for "regular expressions" and no entry for "expression, regualr". None of the email entries linked to anything that mentioned regular expressions, let alone how to do it.

Only in Help Search did I find mention of regular expressions by searching for "regular expression" or just "expression". Either way, only two documents are found in Help: "Using custom filters" and "Specify custom filtering rules".

The "Using custom filters" has a link to a Wikipedia article which has a statement, "The precise syntax for regular expressions varies among tools". So, I wonder which syntax the McAfee regex follows.

The other help document, "Specify custom filtering rules" just mentions that you can do regex with no explanation or link to explanation of how to do regex for McAfee.

Then I tried the other idea. I searched Google, I found http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/support/add-power-to-word-searches-with-regular-expressions-HA0010... . This link explains how to use regex in Microsoft Word. However it did not seem to work in McAfee filters. For example, I entered jer?y in McAfee and clicked the test button. Did not find for jerry which it should have because ? is supposed to match any character.

I found another link http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/regex.htm . This link describes a Posix standard for regex. I tried the . and it seemed to work in McAfee to match any character. I also tried from the same link the regex jer[^.]y. The ^ negates the list inside the [ ]. And my list includes only the dot (.). That seemed to work as well.

I guess to use McAfee regex, you have to get ideas from Internet searches for regex and try the ideas out to see which regex elements McAfee implemented. I am understanding that there is no definitive documentation on McAfee regex.

[mqsuser · Accepted solution]

We will add the regex examples in the help files in our upcoming releases.

[indinfer]

That will be great to have explicit regex explanation and examples in the McAfee help files!