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Documentation

1. Installing CDO (Important!)
2. Installing OLSpamCop
3. Usage instructions
4. Uninstallation instructions

Installing CDO

OLSpamCop uses the Collaboration Data Objects library for Outlook which is not installed by default. You will need to install this yourself:

If you are installing Office for the first time:

1. Insert your Microsoft Office CD and start the setup program if it doesn't start automatically
2. Click through all the screens setting your desired options, selecting a custom installation and 'Choose detailed installation options' and when you get to the screen below, make sure 'Collaboration Data Objects' is set to 'Run from my computer':

3. Click Next to the end of installation to install Outlook with CDO.

If you have already installed Office:

1. Go Start / (Settings) / Control Panel and open 'Add / Remove Programs'
2. Highlight the entry for Microsoft Office and click 'Change'
3. Select 'Add or remove features' and click next.
4. The screen above will appear. Make sure Collaboration Data Objects is set to 'Run from my computer'.
5. Click Update.

Installing OLSpamCop:

• Make sure you have at least 1 MB of available disk space.
• Make sure that the user installing the program has at least "Power User" rights.
• Make sure you have closed Microsoft Outlook before beginning the installation.
• Install CDO from your Office CD (see below)
• Double click on the olspamcop_[version].exe setup program and follow the instructions

Note: When you first start Outlook after installing OLSpamCop, it might ask you for your Microsoft Office / Outlook installation CD. Make sure you have it to hand before you install OLSpamCop.

Usage Instructions:

Start Outlook after installation and you will see the OLSpamCop toolbar appear at the top of the screen:

Click the settings button to bring up the settings page:

Enter your SpamCop reporting email address (or whatever address you want to use to send reports to) in either the top textbox (to enter the address in the To: header of the email) or the bottom textbox (to enter the address in the BCC: header of your report emails) and click the corresponding 'Add' button (the button with two right arrows in it). This will add the address to the list of configured addresses in the list box(es) on the right. You must have at least one email address configured for OLSpamCop to send its reports to. You can enter as many addresses as required into the boxes, but do not enter the same address in both the To box and the BCC box, otherwise that address will get two copies of the email.

You can also specify what you want to do with the spam emails after you report them. Simply check the boxes at the bottom of the settings page to delete, mark as read, or move the messages after deleting them. Note that you have to specify an Outlook folder to move the messages to by clicking the corresponding 'select' button if you want to move messages.

The settings page has two tabs for spam and ham reporting. Most people won't need the ham reporting tab, but if you do want to use it then make sure you check the "Show report button 'Whitelist / Ham'" in the general tab to display the Ham report button. Note that this feature does not work with Spamcop.

You probably will not have to change anything in the 'Report Text' tab. This is just to configure particular aesthetic settings regarding the reports. They are:

• Report subject: This will be the subject of the email reports, and if you have not checked the 'Send multiple reports as one email' option (see below) then the message subject will also have a colon and the subject of the original spam message, to assist with tracking.
• End report text: This is a small text blurb that is appended to the spam message body. This is mainly for SpamCop's benefit, as empty emails or emails with certain characters and no other text are ignored by SpamCop.
• Message body: All OLSpamCop reports are sent as attachments in an email. This is because of problems we have found with HTML emails, line wrapping etc. This will be the text contained within the body of the report email.

The Report Options tab contains options relating to the reports that are sent:

• Ask for verification before sending report: It is usually a good idea to keep this checked, as it can be quite frustrating when you accidentally click the report button instead of something else!
• Keep a copy of the report in my 'sent items' folder: This can be quite useful for keeping records of your spam reports, in case you find you have a reporting problem later on. If you like to save space in your sent items folder then deselect this option.
• Send multiple reports as one email: If checked, if you select multiple spam messages and hit the report button all the reports will be added as attachments into one email. If unchecked, each spam email will be sent in its own email report. Be careful with this option if you are reporting a lot of spam in one go, or if you are reporting lots of large spam emails, as the size of the single report may exceed your sending server's limit and the report may bounce.
• Include my IP address in report: This has been requested by some people for easily tracking who has sent reports within an institution. Your IP address will be placed in the report attachment name (e.g. blacklist_27072004091752_139 222 129 149.txt) for tracking. It is safe to leave this off.
• Use RFC822 for attachments: Some email reporting systems require you to attach spam emails to your report emails in Outlook format, e.g. the same as if you use Insert / Item from Outlook. This feature does not work with Spamcop.
• Perform a send and receive after generating report: After you report some spam, the report email will sit in your drafts folder as pending to be sent until Outlook performs a send and receive. If you check this option then OLSpamCop will force Outlook to perform and full send and receive after generating the report.

The General tab contains other configuration options. They are:

• Show report button 'Whitelist / Ham': This is for internal use if your institution supports whitelist reporting. A new button will be added to your OLSpamCop toolbar which you can use to report false positives to your mail administrator. Generally very few places will use this option. NOTE: SpamCop does not support this option, and will treat the report as a blacklist request. Do not use this option if you report to SpamCop (or any other spam reporting utility that does not explicitly support this whitelist feature).
• Show message preview button: Whether or not you want to display the preview button in the OLSpamCop command bar
• Show Copy to Clipboard button: Ditto for the copy button
• Clean headers: This option will remove any 'Content-type' headers from the spam headers and place a content-type header at the bottom of the headers that corresponds to the actual content type of the spam body. It also removes the Microsoft Mail header which can cause problems with SpamCop. NOTE: SpamCop does not advise the use of this feature, as it reports the message in a modified form. Spam should be reported 'as-is' without any modifications. We only included this option for completeness.
• Suppress confirmation after copying to clipboard: This options will stop the pop-up that appears after you use the 'Copy message source to clipboard' button.
• Embed program into standard commandbar: If you leave this option checked then the buttons will appear on your Outlook standard toolbar instead of in a new toolbar. If you change this option you need to restart Outlook for it to take effect. Note: version 3.0.2 now saves the location of the OLSpamCop toolbar when you shut down Outlook, so you can still keep this option unchecked and not have the toolbar appear all over the place as in 3.0.1.

To report spam, select one or more emails in the Outlook message index by single clicking on them (hold down control and click to select multiple emails) and click the report button. The secure preview viewer also supports multiple messages, but the 'copy to clipboard' function does not. If you select multiple emails and click copy to clipboard then OLSpamCop will only copy the first email it finds to the clipboard.

Uninstallation instructions

To uninstall OLSpamCop, click Start / (Settings) / Control Panel and double click on 'Add / Remove programs'. Windows will compile a list of software on your machine, which might take a few minutes. Locate 'Outlook Mail Report Utility' and select it, then click the 'Change/Remove' button and follow the instructions.

© Leon Mayne, Lars Roland 2004.