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06 Jan 2008: Spamihilator version 0.9.9.38 has been released which fixes some minor bugs.

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• Spamihilator

Dealing with Spam

Spam has been growing at an alarming rate over the last few years. However, now there are steps that you can take to eliminate or at least reduce the problem on your machine.

Now it seems Royal Mail is in the news once more for all the wrong reasons because it wants to increase the amount of actual spam going through the letterbox to increase profits. Email spam is bad enough, but at least it does not cause deforestation and other environmental impacts. Next we will be told that our council tax has to go up again to pay to recycle all this spam paper. Probably the best options are to sign the opt out form or put the spam mail back in the postbox and hope that joined up thinking comes back into fashion.

Using Spamihilator

Most ISPs are now belatedly introducing anti spam software. However, if the efforts that I saw from Freeserve are anything to go by then I would rather control this myself. One man's spam is another man's meat and I found it was continually marking as SPAM messages that I wanted and conversely not marking messages that I did not want. I have been using Spamihilator now for well over a year and I intend to continue with it unless I can find something better. It has many nice features that include the ability to intercept all incoming mail and determine the probability of whether or not the item is spam. With this software you can establish a list of friends that will always be treated as non spam and a list of blocked senders that you do not want to receive from. For example I don't want to receive constant emails about RealOne media player, so that goes on the blocked list. I do want to receive mails from friends, family, mail lists that I subscribe to so they go on my 'friends' list. It also blocks all attachments that are specified on a list; so that you cannot inadvertently run a program just by opening a message. Now that I have been using this product for approaching 2 years I can still thoroughly recommend this as being 'best of breed'. It certainly goes a long way to consigning spam to the cyber dustbin, although it does require some tuning and understanding to get the best results.

Training Mode

That is the easy bit; the clever bit is to use something called 'Baysean statistics' to determine the probability that any other email is friend or spam based on the occurrence of words contained in the message. You can edit the words in the dictionary to tailor it to your uses. In addition it is possible for the software to 'learn' as it goes along what is spam and what is not. This involves going into 'Training' mode, selecting any recent messages that you want treated as spam and then clicking on 'Learn'.
Spamihilator is very easy to setup and was developed by Michael Kramer and is, in the tradition of much fine utility software, originating from Germany. It is free and the current version can be found at the spamihilator website .

Available Plug-ins

There are also some very useful additions to the software that I like (all of these and more can be found on the plugin page at www.spamihilator.com) :-

Pop3Notifier

This plugin notifies whenever a new message arrives. It gives a sound alert and if you click on the popup it takes you straight to Thunderbird or Outlook.

Alphabet Soup Filter

This filters incoming messages for meaningless strings of letters that are used to confuse the spam detectors and if a threshold is exceeded it treats the message as spam.

DCC Filter

This is fairly new so I have not had a chance to evaluate yet, however the principle looks sound. The plugin sends a secure checksum of every incoming mail to the Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse (DCC) network and receives the number of users who also sent the same checksum. Because of that and because it also uses 'fuzzy' checksum matching, it is able to recognize unsolicited bulk mail. You can set the number of users who have been sent the same mail, the default is ten. Remember to use the Newsletter plug-in to identify bulk mail you actually want, such as memberships to forums.

White String Filter

One problem that I started to encounter was that some of the Newsletters that I subscribe to were being rejected as spam, even though they were set up as non-spam in the built in Newsletter plug-in. So I had a quick look in the forum where it suggested using the White String Filter either instead of or in addition to the standard Newsletter plug-in. The idea with this filter is to supply a string of characters that are always contained in the newsletter which will then prevent it from being treated as spam.

Blacklist Filter

This is one filter I definitely would not want to be without due to its effectiveness in eliminating unwanted mail. The filter gathers all IP addresses and domain names listed in URLs in the message body. The IP addresses and URLs are then checked with third party blacklist service providers to see if there is a match. The IP address in the mail header is also checked to see if the sender tried to use a fake address. If you could only use one filter then this is the one I would use.

SpamIOl

This is another very useful plugin that adds two new buttons to the Outlook toolbar so that incoming mail can either be added to your friends or blocked list directly without having to manually go to the Spamihilator toolbox. Note this plugin only works with Outlook, not Outlook Express.

Stats Filter

This is quite a useful filter showing a bar chart of the number of spam messages received each day and also the maximum number of spam messages received in a day.