> Haveing a kmail problem the other day, I logged in via the webmail at
> vz, and found 9 messages, all spam, sitting in the spam folder there.
On Dirtlink (which seems from your description to be using the same
near-useless webmail as vz) you have a few choices and a very few things
that happen automatically:
1 If you take the current default configuration, they will do a decent
but not wonderful virus scan first. They will automatically dump all pure
virus messages with no sign that they did so. If you want to know about
these, you can turn on an incredibly innane option that will send you an
email for each deleted virus email.
Any virus email that they can "partially clean" they dump into a holding
tank and then send you an email per virus that they have "cleaned" this
thing. You CAN NOT turn off these stupid annoyance emails. Fortunately
these prnding virus bits are small and will be deleted in something like 7
days.
2 By default then then scan for spam. I haven't had this turned on in a
few months, but the last time I did it was really quite effective; and has
been for about a year now. Before that it was essentially useless, catching
maybe 10% of the spam.
These spam mails go into the 'caught spam' folder, and DO NOT count against
your mail quota. They will be deleted after some not large number of days,
3-5 as I recall.
3 You can move the spam into your real mail folder. This re-mails it to
you, but bypasses scanning. The headers will be rather strange as a result
of this forwarding. Obviously this now counts against mail quota.
4 You can delete the spam. This doesn't 'delete', it works like a
windows/mac machine and moves it to the 'deleted items' folder. Now this
deleted spam DOES count against your mail quota! Fortunately the deleted
items folder is really deleted after 7 days, I think. However, it is smart
to click the 'empty trash' button that shows up here and there and jump
through the assorted hoops necessary to get this crud really deleted.
BTW, if you move something from deleted items back to inbox, it doesn't move
it, it RE-SENDS it to you! It will show up with new message numbers and get
downloaded a second time by pop.
If you just accept the default configuration of virus and spam scanning and
don't muck with the stuff, it is all reasonably transparent. If you do like
I do and disable one or both of these scans it is also reasonably
transparent, but you get all the spams or virui, depending on your settings.
(I leave the virus scan on and spam scan off.)
Normally your pop3 client will be set to delete the mail as soon as it is
downloaded. I tend to leave it there for about 5 days before deleting it
with a handy little program I cobbled to do that, so I can get to webmail if
I'm not at home, without having to turn off the home feed.
OE will delete the mail from the feed for you, either immediately or after a
period of time. However, I have a double-level pop3 feed because SA sits in
the middle on a linux box, so need to reach around this to delete the stuff
from the main folder. I have fetchmail set to not delete. (I wish it had
an option to delete after N days/hours, but it doesn't seem to.)
Loren
