McAfee Help

How Anti-Spam works

Spam messages are unsolicited email messages sent in bulk, usually to sell something. Phishing messages try to get your personal information by masquerading as legitimate messages from a trusted source. They send you to fraudulent websites, where you fill out information that can be used for identify theft or actual theft.

Anti-Spam works with email programs like Windows Mail, Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, and Mozilla Thunderbird, and filters email that you access through a browser, like Yahoo and Microsoft Hotmail. It works with various types of email accounts, such as POP3, POP3 Webmail, and MAPI (Microsoft Exchange Server).

As soon as you install Anti-Spam, its default settings immediately protect your email from spam and phishing. If you are an advanced user, you might want to fine-tune the software's advanced features. For example, you can:
Decide how aggressively to filter messages by adjusting the filtering level.
Create your own filters to specify what to look for in a message.
Set up a Friends List to ensure that your friends' messages are not filtered, even if they appear to be spam.
Set up your webmail accounts so that Anti-Spam checks the email you receive through a browser.
Add websites that you trust to a whitelist. The websites listed on the whitelist are not filtered.