Documentation

AntiSpam

What is AntiSpam?

AntiSpam is a POP client written by Dave Higton. A POP client is something which retrieves mail from a POP server, such as an ISP may provide. For the initialism impaired, POP is the Post Office Protocol, and ISP stands for Internet Service Provider.

RISC OS handles incoming e-mail in a rather unique two-tier fashion. While Windows mail clients like Eudora will connect directly with a POP or IMAP server to collect mail, RISC OS places this task in the hands of a dedicated POP client with no user-facing interface for reading mail. UNIX, on the other hand, favours directly connecting the user into the mail system, and the local host itself acts as another mail server. The RISC OS ANT Suite can behave a bit like this too, if desired.

So don't download AntiSpam expecting to be able to read your mail. (Equally, don't expect AntiSpam to be able to connect you to your ISP, if you are using a modem. Indeed, you probably already have something or other to download e-mail as part of the suite which allows you to connect to the Internet.) All AntiSpam does is download your mail into a file where it can be "debatched" by a user-facing mail client.

Why would I want AntiSpam?

If you get a lot of Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (UCE), better known, thanks to Monty Python's Flying Circus, as spam, then you probably want to cut down the amount of it you are forced to download. This is where AntiSpam comes in. It makes a determination, while downloading the mail, and with the assistance of a pile of rules and tests, whether a piece of mail is spam to be deleted now, deferred to be (perhaps) downloaded later, relayed only in header form but kept in full on the server. Of course, any message which the rules to determine to be ham (the opposite of spam) or which cannot be acted on as spam is downloaded for your mail client to debatch and show you.

If this is all you want to do, Dave Higton's version will let you do this. Visit his site at:

http://www.apts04.dsl.pipex.com/

Other things you will need to run Dave's AntiSpam (and mine) include:

• RISC OS Select or Adjust; or
• SysLog by Ribbens et al.

Why would I want AntiSpam 1k?

If you have some correspondents who insist on sending HTML in e-mail messages, or you would like to run AntiSpam as part of the ANT Suite, or if you would like to be able to run regular-expression- based tests, then you probably want my variant of AntiSpam. It strips HTML tags from e-mail with some preservation of semantics, you can interoperate with the ANT Suite and you can use regular expressions as tests (with a little help from Kasoft's MultiAS extension.)

You can download the latest version of AntiSpam 1k from this very site:

http://kasoft.info/Downloads/AnSpam1kLatest.zip

(Please read the file !AntiSpam.gpl for licence information.)

Other things you need to run the Kasoft version of AntiSpam include (don't forget Select, Adjust or SysLog):

• The !BASICText resource (included); and
• MultiAS and the RegEx module (both optional,) if you want to use regular-expression-based tests.

(Please read the file Copying or License for licence information.)

Acknowledgements

I owe a debt to Dave Higton and the AntiSpam mailing list for this work: in particular I should thank Tricia Garner for feedback on the ANT Suite connectivity features.

Developers only

As a basis of comparison, I provide a source (i.e. BASICTxt) version of AntiSpam 1.17 which was used as the starting point for the 1k variant.