7) Open the Terminal and type/paste these two commands:

cd /Library/StartupItems/popfile

sudo ./popfile start (type admin password)

8) Depending on how big your corpus is, and how many buckets you have, it might take a minute or two to completely startup POPFile. You do not get any feedback on this in the Terminal. At first I thought I did something wrong, but just waited a couple minutes and I could finally load the POPFile web page. Now go to http://localhost:8080/ and you should see the default POPFile History page.

9) I suggest you setup your bucket preferences such as this: Subject Header Modification OFF, X-Text-Classification Header ON, X-POPFile-Link Header ON, Quarantine Message, OFF. Being able to turn these on and off on a bucket by bucket basis is a nice feature, but right now I am not using these individual preferences.

The developer, John, even has a page devoted to gathering funds for a 12" PowerBook G4. He can test POPFile on Windows and Linux, but not on Mac OS X. So help him out and donate!

I talked to John sometime late last year about an easier install for OS X (there is a very nice installer for Windows) but he has not had time to get to me on the subject. It sure would be nice to have the binaries for OS X all setup in a package.

So why do I still use POPFile over SpamSieve? Well, I am not afraid of the command line, and I have used POPFile for a long time (I used it on my PC for sometime before installing it on my Mac). Also, not until recently did SpamSieve support the features I need for Apple Mail. SpamSieve might be easier to install then POPFile, but where is the fun in that?

I have all my clients buy SpamSieve and use it. It is easy for me to install and support.