When email with a badword is found, you can set the option to tag the email's subject with any tag such as "** BADWORD **". When then email arrives, you can instantly see the ones tagged "bad".
You can add email addresses that you do not want be checked for bad words, such as a trusted contact. You can add specific email addresses, or specify "@domain.com", to whitelist ALL emails from *@domain.com.
Each email that runs through the wordassassin program gets an extra email header. Mail clients such as Outlook Express can use these headers to sort your mail into different mailboxes, based on, if a bad word was found or not. The header is in the format "X-Wordassassin: BADWORD".
Due to the varieties of HTML tags, and special characters, when the wordassassin sees an HTML message, it uses a special engine, to look for words built up with odd HTML tags which may translate to text, such as ampersand codes.
If a bad word is found in an HTML format messages, the word that was bad becomes "striked out".
You can enable wordassassin to simply delete email messages where a bad word is found. You will never even see the message, and it will not waste space in your email box.