In order for Spam Buster to catch spam, it uses specific conditions to identify "suspicious" e-mails. Spam Buster comes with many conditions already defined. For example: if the Subject contains "!!", then mark the e-mail. You can find these in the Spam Settings. The Subject, Headers, and Sender tabs refer to the appropriate parts of an e-mail.

You can easily add your own personalized conditions to the e-mail spam settings, or change an existing condition to better suit your needs.

Under the Size tab, you can set the option to check for the size of an e-mail message to see if it is spam. For example, an email message over 2mb in size could have an e-mail attachment indicating it is spam. Specify how small or large the e-mail should be to be marked as "suspicious."

Under the Exceptions tab, you can set up a list of conditions for e-mails you do not want to exclude, such as those from friends or from a newsgroup to which you subscribe. In addition, any e-mail matching one of the conditions can have an icon put next to it to easily identify it for you.

Included with Spam Buster is a BlackList, which is an editable list of e-mail addresses of known spammers collected from various public sources on the internet. Spam Buster automatically checks each incoming e-mail against this list first. You may delete this list and add your own if you wish. You may also disable this feature, which will result in Spam Buster loading much more quickly.