Spam Free Email

I’ve been working on an IP Address database over at http://www.spiderhunter.com. The funny thing is that I was designing it to work as easily for tracking search engine spiders as spammers. It took a friend of mine to point out that I should include the IP database here as well.

So while I am working on the IP database it will reside at http://ipd.spiderhunter.com but once I get a final product I will be hosting it here as well.

Both services will be the same and both of them will have some infomration for free and the rest will be a subscription service. There will be no need to subscribe to both services. The IP database at spider hunter may get new features a day or two before the one here, but that is only because I will be using that one as my devlopment environment.

So go check it out and give me some feed back ….

I was reading over at Webmaster World and I found this gem:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum5/6053.htm

The basic idea it that you can now describe certain links as link that you do not want to give credit to on your page rank. This is being designed for Bloggers, but I think this is going to have an effect on forums as well.

In the forums applicaiton that I wrote I give every user a place to link to thier own web site. Now with this tool I can regain some of the leaked PR from those pages.

Also, any link within the content of the posts on the forums could have this as well.

I think this is going to be a boom for content providers, and it will prevent spammers from trying to clog up our content with links to thier sites.

It always comes down to the fact that if you remove the incentive, people will no longer take advatage of the system. Until they can find a new way around ….

I was starting my research on creating a system using qmail and SpamAssassin to make an anti spam store and forward email server. I was on http://www.qmail.org checking out the latest info for qmail when I some how got to the page for the MailToaster

It has almost everything that I wanted straight out of the virtual box. It uses qmail has support for SpamAssassin and has some support for maintaining your users in MySql.

The system is based on a FreeBSD installation, but that means that you could write a MailToaster and create it into a full commercial product without too much effort. (Licensing issues are more relaxed on FreeBSD)

In any case, the docs and everything for the MailToaster look pretty good, so I’m going to see what it will take to set it up to do store and forward. If I can do that, then I have a new favorite toy

I was over at http://www.apache.org/ looking for some Java code to help with my IP database project and I notice a nice little link on the leftbar labeled ”’SpamAssassin”’. This got my interested right away, I thought SpamAssassin was a commercial product, not open source.

So upon checking it out at http://spamassassin.apache.org/ I was happy to find that it is an open source project that is the basis for many commerical projects.

Now that I know that SpamAssassin is open source I’m seriously thinking of getting back into the idea of creating an anti spam store and forward email server. I’m going to see what it will take to put a single server together to do this and try it on a few of my domains.

I’ll let you know how it goes on this blogs, but if it goes well I’d hope to have a service that would greatly reduce spam for a very low cost.

Even better would be a package that could easily be put on some hardware and anyone could create an anti spam store and forward email server out of a spare PC that they having laying around.

The Nigerian Scam, also known as Advance Fee Fraud Scheme is one of the oldest scams on the Internet. It may be one of the oldest schemes out there.

The idea is that some poor soul has millions or billions of US dollars and needs your help to get out of this country. If only you could send them $5,000 to pay for them and their family to get out of the country they will give you half the money.

I’m sure most of you reading this have gotten one of these in your email box and laughed. I had a client ask me about one just yesterday. She of course had deleted the message already, thank god, but it was the conversation that got me.

She knew that it was a scam, but wanted to ask me just in case. I was pretty sure up till that point that anyone who had used email for a while knew about the Nigerian Scam and just deleted them, and that it was only niave newbies that got caught by that one these days.

So the moral of todays story: ”’If it looks to good to be true, it probably is”’

While going through my current server dilemas, I was a Fry’s shopping for RAM. I ended up in a conversation with a nice guy about RAID arrays and MS Exchange.

He mentioned in the conversation that MS Exchange represent 68% of email server sales. It didn’t dawn on me till later that qmail and sendmail are free and therefore can’t be sold. It kind of squews the numbers when you can’t compete against free stuff.

The real question is what percentage of email is sent from what kind of servers on the Internet, not who sells the most.

Of course I’m a huge fan of qmail. It does more for me and more easily the MS Exchange and I’ve supported 5 to 7 different MS Exchange installations. I’ve also spent more long nights repairing exchange than I’ve ever spent supporting qmail, and when I was doing that for qmail it was bad code that I wrote!

The next real question is what [[EmailServer:email servers]] do [[EmailSpammers:spammers]] use. I’d expect it to be [[QmailEmailServer:qmail]] or sendmail, perhaps some custom [[EmailSpammers:spammer]] only email software.

For about a week now I’d been collecting the [[IpAddress:IP addresses]] for every server that connects to my email server. It’s part of an [[IpDatabase:IP Address database]] that I’m working on at http://ipd.spiderhunter.com . I got to thinking that it wouldn be too hard to run a quick [[RealtimeBlackholeList:RBL]] query on some [[IpAddress:IPs]] that are sending email. Fitler out the ones that send the [[SpamMessages:spam]] and do some telnet queries to identify the [[EmailServer:email server]].

Not too hard, but is it worth the time and effort ….

This morning when I woke up the server had crashed and simplly wouldn’t boot up. Nothing I did would help, of course it ened up being something simple. The RAM.

Apprently two of the four RAM sticks fried last night, so for most of today we have been running on 2GB, instead of 3GB.

Now the server is up to 4GB of RAM. Hopefully this will speed some things up, but more importantly they won’t be any slower

I just finished implimenting a revenue sharing system that allows any wiki author that has their own Adsense account to share page impressions on this site.

If you are interested in the details please email me at simpleenigma@spamfreeemail.com