Tutorial

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If you have already created an account, please skip step one

• 1: Create your account
• 2: Adding and modifying addresses
• 3: Adding other users (sub users)
• 4: Advanced address settings (Virus and spam settings)
• 5: Adding friends and blacklisting
• 6: Making senders authenticate themselves (challenge response)
• 7: Sending mail as one of the addresses (including hiding your real address)
• 8: Making money from Quitspam
• 9: Adding your own domains (so email is @yourdomain.com)
• 10: Creating temporary (disposable) accounts
• 11: Group addresses
• 12: Statistics and logs

1: Create your account

Go to https://www.quitspam.com/login.php and enter your firstname, your surname, your home email address, a password (with mininum of 5 characters) and read the terms and conditions. And select submit.

An email will be sent to you with details of your login and a confirmation link that you must click on to activate your account. Click on the link. A page will open and ask you to choose your subdomain. The subdomain will be the part of the email between the @ sign and 'quitspam.com' in all your emails, so it it worth choosing wisely. For this example, we will choose example.quitspam.com.

A box has quitspams suggested domain (based on your first and surname) and several other options are listed below. Enter your favourite into the box and select submit. If you enter one that is taken, you will be asked to enter another.

Now you will be directed to the account page which shows you your default settings. You account is now created and verified.

 

Standard features

2: Adding and modifying addresses

To create a new address, select Addresses from the left hand column. The email address page will be shown. Create a new one by selecting the 'Add new address' link at the top.

In the Add address page, select an email address to enter in the first box. For this example, we will enter the word test. This means we will create the email address test@example.quitspam.com.

You may wish to enter a note such as 'part of the quitspam tutorial' and then you should select the action for this email.At this stage, you just have two options.

1. Delete - all mail will be deleted
2. Your home email address - all mail will be forwarded

Select 'delete' and then commit. You will be taken to the addresses page listing all your email addresses.

You can test this by sending an email to this user ('test@example.quitspam.com') and the email will be deleted. If you wish, you can go back and change the action to be your email address. Now when you send an email to this user, you will receive the email on your home address.

3: Adding other users (sub users)

Included in the standard account is one sub user. A sub user could be a friend, spouse or business colleague who also wants to receive mail at your domain (example.quitspam.com).

To create the sub user, select the sub user link on the left to go to the sub user page. Then select 'Add new sub user'

Enter their home email address and then commit.

This will take you back to the sub user page and will show their email address and their keyphrase. The keyphrase is only used for the premium account so you can send email out through this account.

Now, if you go back the addresses page, you can create another address. Enter test2 in the email column and 'sub user example' in the notes column. For the action, you can now select the new sub user.

You can test this by sending an email to the new address 'test2@example.quitspam.com' and it will be forwarded to the new sub user.

Premium features

All the following features require you to have a premium account

4: Advanced address settings (Virus and spam settings)

For this example, create a new email address by selecting addresses from the left column and select 'add new address'.

Enter test3 in the email column, 'virus and spam tutorial' in the notes, and select your email for the action.

In the virus protection, select 'On'

In the spam protection, select 10. This will stop a moderate amount of spam.

Leave the 'Friends and blacklist policy' set to Everyone. This means all mail will get through (if it passes the virus and spam protection)

Also, leave the outgoing mails set.

Now when mail is sent to test3@example.quitspam.com, it will be virus checked and spam checked. If it fails either, you will not receive the mail.

5: Adding friends and blacklisting

Select Friends from the left column to take you to the friends page. Select add new friend.

Enter as many email addresses as you like and select commit. These will be added to your friends list.

Now, select blacklist from the left column to go to the blacklist page. Select ban a new email address.

This time, try adding '@hotmail.com' and select commit. This will be added to your blacklist.

Now go back the addresses page and edit your test3 email address (select the spanner to edit).

Under 'Friends and blacklist policy', if you select friends only, then only the addresses entered in your friends list will be able to send you email. If you select the bottom option 'Allow all but blacklisted' then everyone apart from the people in your blacklist (in this example anyone from hotmail.com) will be able to send you mail.

The other option will be explained in the next section.

6: Making senders authenticate themselves (challenge response)

If in the above example, you select 'friends allowed, blacklist excluded, challenge others', then senders in your friends list will be allowed through, senders in your blacklist will be deleted but the others will receive an email asking them to click on the verification link. If they do not, the email will be discarded in 7 days. If they do, they will be added to your friends and the email sent through.

You can always override somebody, by adding them to your blacklist.

You can at any time, view all the pending challenge response emails by select 'challenge response' from the left column.

7: Sending mail as one of the addresses (including hiding your real address)

You may wish to send an email to somebody and have it appear as one of your quitspam addresses. By clicking on the address hiding page, you can enter who the mail is to (for example bill.gates@microsoft.com), who it is from (e.g. test3@example.quitspam.com) and the send to field will be populated with the address to mail it to (you can also click on the mailto link).

To save you time, you can also ask that quitspam adds the recipient to your friends or banned list, and you can automatically create an email entry for the recipient.

To save even more time, all your friends are listed in the quick select To: column and all your email addresses are listed in the Quick Select From: field. By selecting either of these, you will automatically fill in the above fields for you.

8: Making money from Quitspam

You can make money from quitspam by refering others to us. If they subscribe to an advanced account within 60 days, you will be paid $7.5. The money will be credited to your account, which you can have transfered to a paypal account.

9: Adding your own domains (so email is @yourdomain.com)

To make your email addresses more friendly or meaningful, you can register domain names and set the email to come to quitspam. To find available domain names, we recommend Domain Name Soup.

If you already have domains registered, you can redirect these also.

To point the domain to Quitspam, you must change the MX record to point to mx1.quitspam.com and mx2.quitspam.com (we recommend a priority of 10 and 20 respectively). We will be writing some guides soon for the most popular domain name hosts (registrars).

When you have done this select domains and enter your domain name in the 'domain to add' field. This should not contain the www. part.

Then select your default action (receive on your email, delete or disposable).

Select commit to finish.

Because DNS changes can take up to 48 hours to update around the world, it is possible, you might need to wait a while before you can do this.

Once this step is complete, you can now go to addresses and start adding addresses at this domain.

10: Creating temporary (disposable) accounts

Sometimes, when you subscribe to a website forum, blog or any other service, they will request your email address. Sometimes, this will result in you getting lots of unwanted email. However, you must read the first mail they send you, to activate your account on their website.

To combat this, you can create a temporary (or disposable) email address. When they send you a confirmation email, open this under the disposable email page. From this page, you can see all the emails sent to you in the last 24 hours. You can click on any confirmation links and activate your account safe in the knowledge that your email address is protected.

After, you can either delete the message, forward it to your private email address or leave it to be automatically deleted.

11: Group addresses

If you have any sub users created, you may wish to create a group email address, so that mail sent to that account is sent to all receipients.

Firstly, you need to create a group, so go to the groups page and select 'add group'. Enter a group name (in this example, enter group1). Select any of your email addresses by ticking the box. Select commit. A new group will be created.

Now go to the Addresses page and select 'Add new address'.

In the email field, enter grouptest. In the notes field, enter 'Group address test' and in the action list select #group1

You can set the virus, spam, friends policy and outgoing emails options to anything you wish (leave them as default in this exampe).

Select commit.

You now have an email address of grouptest@example.quitspam.com with any emails being forwarded to all group members.

12: Statistics and logs

When you receive emails, they are stored in a log and a counter is incremented. The log is very useful for seeing how effective your settings are. So for instance, if you receive some mails you thought would be stopped by the spam score, you can view the log and see what score they were given. This might help you to choose a different spam level to block.

It is also useful to add the sender to your blacklist or friends list.

Please note, for privacy reasons, you will not see logs of mails sent to sub users.

If you wish to see how effective quitspam is being, you can go to the statistics page and it will show you how many mails received on any one day, month or year.

By clicking on a month, it will display that month by day.