Computer help

Wizard

Literotica Guru
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Dec 30, 1999
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Anyone of you computer folks know of any Spam blockers I can buy at a store that works and comes with a cd?


I have never heard if any of them work.
:confused:
 
I know you said "CD" and "Buy at store" but there is a small free-bee guy (113K download) that works pretty well right out of the bag.

http://keir.net/k9.html

I've got a lot of correspondance with legit cutomers that looks similar to SPAM (I'm a business) and K9 got it right 96% of the time before I started telling it when it made a mistake. Now it's 99.66%
 
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ReadyOne said:
I know you said "CD" and "Buy at store" but there is a small free-bee guy (113K download) that works pretty well right out of the bag.

http://keir.net/k9.html

I've got a lot of correspondance with legit cutomers that looks similar to SPAM (I'm a business) and K9 got it right 96% of the time before I started telling it when it made a mistake. Now it's 99.66%

Just how effective is this with an email program other than the usual ones? I don't use Outlook or Edora for email, I use Pegasus. Its one primary advantage has always been its pretty immune to email based attached viruses (it won't automatically run anything, it lacks that ability totally).
 
K9 runs as a "proxy" pop3 server on your machine. You tell you mail program to pick up mail from 127.0.0.1 aka localhost using port 9999 instead of port 110. K9 in turn picks up mail from your real pop3 program using (the standard) port 110.

This is all configurable. You mail program old setting might be

Server: pop3.mail.net
user: myaccount
port: 110

The new settings would be

Server: localhost
user: pop3.mail.net/110/myaccount
port: 9999

I realize you aren't using OE, but it will configure and unconfigure OE automatically.

As far as using K9, normally you set it to tag each email to add something to the header like [SPAM] that a message rule in your mail program can filter against.

When K9 gets something wrong, you open the K9 window, find the e-mail, and retag it as "good" or "spam".

K9 then updates its data base (it uses the entire contents of the e-mail and statistical rules bases on what's in the database) to refine future guesses.

It also has black and white lists, plus it can look at one of the "black hole" services to check the sender's IP address. This actually weeds out a lot, like 80%.

The spammers seem to have been forced off of most legitimate systems onto foreign systems. This means that mail really from yahoo users doesn't get flagged so often. (Remember the forged user can say yahoo, but the originating IP address won't be a real yahoo system.)

The only thing it doesn't do that it should is a reverse-IP address lookup on the sender. Legitimate systems always register their name in the internet DNS servers so an IP address can be converted back to a system name.

Spamming systems prefer to be anonymous. Of course they start registering pseudonyms, but at least the high level part of the name is verifiable.

If the top level DNS allocated and address to xxx.org, then a spammer using asdf.xxx.org could register as qwerty.xxx.org; but they could not register as asdf.yyy.org or qwerty.yyy.org because the top level DNS knows enough to say that no yyy.org system can have the IP address the spammer is using.

Aw well, I run on with too much information... It happens when SO isn't around to occupy me with other things!
 
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Thanks for your detailed explaination

Ready One,
The site seems to leave some explanation lacking.
I downloaded and tried to set it up, but it automatically set up OUTLOOK, and left OE alone. When I tried to set up OE per the instructions, All I managed to get was 10 spam and regulat emails all with [Spam] pasted in fron of the subject line.

OK, I'll read the detailed stuff first before I complain too much. I am desperate for a good spam blocker, but this one doesn't seem to be very user friendly.

OK, after 2 days of tweeking and clicking, I finally actually got the spam to go automatically to the Spam folder! This thing might be working ok now. It does take a little learning, but it might be worth it.
 
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