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Contents > Plugin Guide

You can add extra spam-filtering capabilities to SpamPal by installing Plugins.

Plugins are the second key to how SpamPal filters out the spam. SpamPal has a powerful plugin interface and documentation to allow others to add extra features to SpamPal.

Plugins are available on this page for Bayesian filtering, regular expression filtering, censoring web bugs, logging, spam quarantining, extra DNSBL blocking functions and more.

Quick Index
1. Overview

2. Available Plugins
2.1 Available Plugins: Spam detection plugins
2.2 Available Plugins: Reporting and logging plugins
2.3 Available Plugins: Protection plugins

3. Other Plugins/Third Party Tools

4. Plugin hints and tips: Bayesian

1. Overview

You can obtain plugins from the SpamPal website; install them in the plugins directory within the SpamPal installation and they will appear on this pane, but you will have to make sure that you highlight the one you want and then click Enable/Disable to enable them before they will work.

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2.1. Available Plugins: Spam detection plugins


Plugin Name: RegEx Filter [Stephan Slabihoud]
Plugin Description: A plugin allowing you to filter or whitelist your email based on Perl Regular Expressions.

Plugin Name: URL-Body [Paul Wright]
Plugin Description: This plugin extends SpamPal to filter on not just where a message came from, but any websites it mentions as well! Useful because many DNSBLs list lots of spammers' websites. However, carries a greater risk of mistakes too

Plugin Name: Uncached DNSBL [James_Day]
Plugin Description: This plugin lets you make uncached DNSBL queries to the NJABL, Osirusoft, SpamCop or Easynet (formerly Wirehub) server. Use a higher caching period for most DNSBLs and this plugin for one or two of them which change quickly. The default is SpamCop only. Remember to turn off any DNSBL you turn on here in the main public DNSBL panel. Otherwise you're just slowing yourself down for no reason.

Note: currently UcDNSBL does not take into account IP addresses that are on the ignorelist. It also currently only makes lookups for IP address that in the headers of an email but not for IP addresses found in the body, via the URLBody plugin

Plugin Name: Bad Words [James Farmer]
Plugin Description: A simple example plugin designed to combat porn-spam. Messages containing any bad words are automatically tagged as spam; the list of bad words can be modified
by the user.

CAUTION: This plug in has very limited usage and may cause good mails to be marked as spam (especially when email has attachments). It is usually better to use RegEx Filter instead.

Plugin Name: Good Words [James_Day]
Plugin Description: The GoodWords plugin whitelists any email containing any of a list of good words you supply. Use product names, pet names and such to protect your legitimate email from being marked as spam.

CAUTION: Using this plug-in may cause some spam to be classified as good mail.

Plugin Name: MXBlocking [James_Day]
Plugin Description: Direct to MX spam is spam mail direct from a dialup-equivalent IP address to the mail server of the destination, without going through the outgoing mail server of the sender. Legitimate people tend to send mail through the mail server of their ISP. Spammers don't.

These plugins block mail if the IP address on the first Received line is on a dialup-equivalent list. Dialup-equivalent is dialup, dynamic cable and dynamic DSL.

Plugin Name: Bayesian [tBB]
Plugin Description: A very new plugin currently undergoing development, which uses the new but increasingly popular tactic called Bayesian filtering to detect spam.

Bayesian works like this:

o Whenever you receive a mail it looks into its database to find matching words included in the database and the mail. Every match not only increases the score for the mail but also increases the value in the database.

o Reclassify means that the values in the database are corrected whenever you change a mail from good to bad or vice versa. Switching mails between good and bad only changes the entries in the database which match for later mails.

o New mails match the changed database with different probabilities depending on the values in the database. Already processed mails can't be changed after that which means that the headers that are once written can't be changed again because the mails are already in you mail-client. Only the database can be changed according to your reclassification.

o The more you train Bayesian the better is the database from the beginning and the better are your initial and later results.

CAUTION: This plug in is still in an experimental devleopment phase and should only be used by experienced users. It requires a training period of at least a couple of hundred good mails and spams before the results become accurate.

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2.2 Available Plugins: Reporting and logging plugins


Plugin Name: UserLogf [James_Day]
Plugin Description: This plugin creates a logfile summarising the messages SpamPal has processed with different logs for each mail server and account. It can also be used to Quarantine messages (including headers & message body) to provide easy access to messages before they were process by SpamPal.

The quarantine option which you can tell to save a copy of mail which isn't spam. That would guarantee you a completely unchanged copy of any email you receive. It's a convenient option for those who need automatic legal logging of things but don't
want to have to keep them in their email client or make other filing arrangements.

To turn on quarantining of non-spam emails, add the line QUARANTINE_NON_SPAM to the User Logfile config.dat file.


Plugin Name: Logfile [Stephan Slabihoud]
Plugin Description: This plugin creates a logfile summarising the messages SpamPal has processed

Plugin Name: Quarantine [Stephan Slabihoud]
Plugin Description: Every time you download a message SpamPal recognises as spam, this plugin saves it into a special folder; useful if you need to get at the original source of a spam in order to track down a spammer.

Plugin Name: Notify [Stephan Slabihoud]
Plugin Description: a simple plugin that plays different sounds for Spam and regular mail
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2.3 Available Plugins: Protection plugins

Plugin Name: HTML Modify [Heiko Höbel]
Plugin Description: HTMLModify removes Javascript, Applets, Sounds, Webbugs in html emails, so that you can use your email program for reading HTML-Mails without giving Spammers/Hackers the chance to damage your PC or to track their mails.

HTMLModify will also rename dangerous file attachments that could contain a virus (such as .bat,.scr etc. etc) and may, as a result, stop such a file form auto-running.
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3. Other Plugins/Third Party Tools
File Description

Command-line tool to help convert a Forte Agent address book into a SpamPal whitelist.

Plugin for the Becky email program that copies all the email addresses from your Becky address book into the clipboard, from where they can be pasted into SpamPal's whitelist. For more details, have a look at this discussion thread.

Converts and Sorts various single line email addresses, for use with programs such as SpamPal, RegEx and Hamster

An Outlook macro that can be used to export the Email contacts from Outlook, in a format which can be used as a SpamPal whitelist.

A simple VB-script that exports the Outlook Express blocked senders list as a plain textfile, for use with SpamPal or anything else you fancy.

A VB-script written by someone who was having problems with SpamPal when using Windows XP's fast user switching to switch between two users, both of whom need to use SpamPal. It checks whether SpamPal is running or not. If yes, then it is not started, if no, it's fired up. It makes use of Windows Scripting Host (only tested with 5.6) and a freeware program called pslist (get it here).
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4. Plugin hints and tips: Bayesian
see this page for how to use Outlook Express to import clean and spam email's in bayesian.
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