Re: How can I fix this spam dilemma?
From: *Vanguard* (no-email_at_reply-to-newsgroup.invalid)
Date: 05/17/04
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- In reply to: PeterM: "Re: How can I fix this spam dilemma?"
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Date: Mon, 17 May 2004 14:08:48 -0500
PeterM said in news:FIednfUIh9QgUDXdRVn_iw@omsoft.com:
> Wow, I'm willing to make a donation to you for that so complete and
> generous explanation of everything that I was afraid of reading. I be
> honest with you, I was afraid that all this spam stuff was really the
> way you explained it. I will have to read your answer again and
> again, but it was written so nicely, that I understood each
> sentence., and I'm an immigrant with English as my second language.
> Bravo for your words, and your talent to write in such a wonderful
> easy to understand way. I will change things with my spam program,
> and going with the one that you recommended. Bless you for your great
> explanation................Peter
SpamPal runs as a proxy. If you haven't set one up before, it can be
daunting. However, getting it installed is not the hard part. The hard
part is configuring your e-mail client to use it. The two biggest
factors in configuring your e-mail client is the definition of its
e-mail accounts under the username and pop3 server fields:
username = <yourusername>@<yourpop3server>[:<pop3port>]
pop3 server = localhost
Basically you modify your existing POP3 e-mail accounts to append some
information after the username. This is used by the proxy to determine
to where it will connect. That is because you had to remove that
information from the pop3 server field and tell your e-mail client to
instead connect to a local proxy ("localhost" is the built-in hostname
for your own computer and equates to an IP address of 127.0.0.1 which
you can also use).
I actually edit the 'hosts' file (under %windir%\system32\drivers\etc)
to add identifiable names to local proxies. For example, in my hosts
file, I have:
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 SpamPal
So instead of putting "localhost" in the Pop3 server field in the e-mail
account definition, I put in "SpamPal". This is a handy reminder of why
I have an oddball server specified in my e-mail account for the POP3
server. Since I actually end up chaining proxies together (the other
one, called YahooPOPs, lets me access my Yahoo e-mails without paying
Yahoo for their POP3/SMTP access), it is handy to know that "localhost"
specifed as "SpamPal" in the POP3 server is for a connect to that local
proxy and "YahooPOPs" specified after the username reminds me that the
connect then goes to the YahooPOPs proxy (after the SpamPal one). You
can have as many alias names to 127.0.0.1 as you want in the hosts file.
In fact, there are anti-spyware and ad-blocking versions of the hosts
file that adds a slew of sites - because making them resolve to your own
host instead of their, and because your host won't have that content to
proffer to your browser, means you have effectively killed their content
or links.
When setting up your anti-spam proxy, just think of it graphically
according to the order of nodes through which the e-mail traffic passes.
e-mail client <-- SpamPal proxy <-- POP3 mail server
That's how you want to setup SpamPal for a normal route. That is how I
have mine setup to access my ISP's POP3 mail server. However, because I
also use YahooPOPs to get my Yahoo e-mails, my pseudo-POP3 e-mail
accounts defined for Yahoo e-mails looks like:
e-mail client <-- SpamPal <-- YahooPOPs <-- Yahoo mail
So it can get complicated quickly. I have heard (but not experienced)
that there may be a problem if you let SpamPal usurp the default port
110 for POP3 (and port 25 for SMTP if you enable SpamPal for outbound
traffic). What I heard is that you need to be logged on as an
administrator to let SpamPal usurp those standard ports. However, you
can define SpamPal to listen on any port number you want. I configure
SpamPal to listen for POP3 connects (from my e-mail clients) on port
7110. It is configured (but not enabled) to listen to SMTP connects on
port 7025. Similarly, I have YahooPOPs configured to listen for POP3
connects on port 8110 and SMTP connects on port 8025.
I assume IHateSpam tries to automate all this setup for you. However,
anti-virus software sometimes also runs as a proxy and also wants to
make changes to the same fields in your e-mail client, so you have to
know what is going on with those fields. There was a lot of hoopla over
a company that "borrowed" the source code for SpamPal to include in
their own product. SpamPal is completely free to use. It is also
completely free to incorporate within your own product as long as you
don't change its code and you retain its copyright notice. This other
company (http://www.spamspector.com/), after explaining much more in
detail regarding their plans, was going to provide an installation
wizard for SpamPal, develop a plug-in for Outlook (which was really
superfluous except that it might make configuration a wee bit easier),
and would provide their own support (rather than point users at the
SpamPal forums), so they were providing value and the hoopla subsided
(see
http://www.spampalforums.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3651&highlight=wizard).
As a courtesy on their web site (and a requirement in documentation
regarding use of copyrighted software), they acknowledge that
"SpamSpector is a state of the art anti-spam software based on SpamPal
technology". At $29.99, it is amongst the cheapest priced anti-spam
products but it is a very good anti-spam product (well, SpamPal is).
Because it is built on SpamPal, you should be able to use all the
plug-ins that work for SpamPal, like Bayesian filtering, URL filtering,
regular expressions plug-in, quarantining text-only versions of spam (I
wrote a .bat file to expire those over N days old), an HTML modify
plug-in that will strip out web bugs and other HTML nasties and weight
an HTML-formatted e-mail to determine how spammy it is (like the
excessive use of bogus HTML tags containing text that will get skipped
by word list filters). SpamPal (and SpamSpector) can use the P2P (Peer
to Peer) plug-in that checks how many other people received the same
message. The same spam body gets sent to many recipients; however, lots
of spam now inserts a hash-buster string of words or characters into
each instance of their crap to alter the checksum computed for that
message so I don't know how well the P2P plug-in will work, plus you
would need to connect to a database server to retrieve that info. I
haven't used the P2P plug-in because it is rare that a spam doesn't get
caught by SpamPal, or one of the plug-ins that I do use (Bayesian,
HTML-Modify, URLbody, and also Quarantine in case it really wasn't
spam).
Make use of the SpamPal forums as they can be very helpful in resolving
problems. If you buy SpamSpector then use their support that you paid
for.
- Next message: Frank Saunders, MS-MVP, IE/OE: "Re: OE6 on XP -- backup or copy Rules?"
- Previous message: Frank Saunders, MS-MVP, IE/OE: "Re: OE 6 -- shortcut for executing all rules?"
- In reply to: PeterM: "Re: How can I fix this spam dilemma?"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ]
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