Sp@m C@tcher 2.0
Copyright © Amer Neely
Anyone who has an email account has more than likely received spam at one time or another. Some users get more than others, depending on how active they are in newsgroups and web surfing.
A recent (July 25, 2006) digest I subscribe to has this to say:
Having been active on the Internet since about 1984, I'm outraged at the level of spam I receive. And it keeps getting worse. Attempts at reducing or eliminating spam have run the gamut from local / state laws to 'black hole' lists administered by volunteers. Filters on email programs are getting smarter, but the tide of spam is larger than the solutions.
Spam is going to be here for a long time, and I have my doubts whether it will ever be eliminated. I've tried various software filtering solutions, but I found I was always tinkering with the rules to identify spam. ISPs have implemented spam filtering on their servers, but this is a double-edged sword. How many false positives are caught and thrown away? How many false negatives slip through the net and end up in your mailbox?
Most of the filtering methods seem to involve having a list of known spam addresses, or some kind of formula for scanning a message to determine whether it is spam or not. The fundamental problem with that method as I see it is that, the number of spam addresses constantly increases, so you are constantly updating lists of 'bad guys'.
I decided to take the opposite approach and wrote a simple mail reader that compares incoming addresses with a 'buddy' list. If the incoming 'From' address isn't in my list, it gets flagged as spam. Since my buddy list doesn't grow nearly as fast as the bad guy list, it takes less time and effort to keep things updated. To get my initial list I exported my address book to a text file and stripped out everything but the email addresses. How hard was that?
The most direct benefit of using Sp@m C@tcher will be by those users owning a personal POP account, not a generic one like 'info' or 'sales'. Because of the way Sp@m C@tcher works, generic POP accounts are not good candidates. They are meant for receiving email from anyone at all, and thus will not likely have a matching entry in a 'Buddy' list.
An important note: Sp@m C@tcher is not designed to access mail from web-based accounts such as Hotmail, Yahoo!, or AOL. The accounts must be POP or POP3 accounts hosted at an Internet Service Provider. Sp@m C@tcher allows you to configure up to 12 of these accounts.
Sp@m C@tcher is run BEFORE you run your email program, thus getting rid of the spam first. It doesn't download anything unless you tell it to, by 'viewing' an email.
After a login process, you access your personal version. The first time you run it, you set up the mail accounts you want to check. These are the 'POP' or 'POP3' accounts you hear about. Your current email program is set up to access these, so you should be able to use those same settings.
Next, you set up your list of 'friendly' email addresses. This is a simple text file consisting of one email address per line. You can also manage this list, as well as your account list from within Sp@m C@tcher.
Sp@m C@tcher is currently set to refresh itself every 7 minutes. This is not often enough to place a burden on the mail server, but should be sufficient for most users. A planned feature is to allow users to configure this value. If your email program is currently set to check your mail every so many minutes, change that to 0 (or don't check mail), and use that value for Sp@m C@tcher.
Now, you are ready to use the program! That's how easy it is.
If there is mail in an account, it will show you a brief amount of information about each one, as you saw in the screen shot from the previous page. Rest assured the whole message isn't downloaded unless you hit the 'View' button.
Once you are satisfied all the spam messages have checks in their checkboxes, hit the red 'Delete' button, and all those messages that are checked will be deleted from the server. Now all you have to do is use your regular email program to download what's left.
Typically, the browser window to Sp@m C@tcher is left open so you don't have to log in every time you want to use it. Since it automatically checks for mail, you only have to glance briefly at it once in a while to see if you have new mail.