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Miscellaneous Ramblings

A New Anti-Spam Weapon: POPmonitor 2

Charles Moore - 2002.04.22 - Tip Jar

Spam keeps getting worse, and in the past six months or so the volume of spam I receive seems to have quadrupled. I have about 20 email accounts, and while some are virtually spam-free, others are attracting a persistent onslaught of junk mail.

The worst is my oldest email account - the one I have with my ISP. One alternative would be to just change my email address, but so many people have that address (which is presumably why it has become such spam magnet) that it would be a hassle to notify everyone of a change, and I would doubtless miss some not-frequent correspondents.

Another workaround has been using Nisus Email as my email client for that account. Nisus has the happy facility of allowing you to preview messages on the server and to delete unwanted ones without downloading them - an extra step, but a net timesaver when you're on a slow, dialup connection like I am.

However, it still rankles, and lately I have been getting between 50 and 100 spam messages daily on that account. It's frustrating to just sit there and take this barrage of garbage from pornmongers and get rich quick scammers and purveyors of Viagra and breast augmentation. The banality and idiocy of spam adds insult to injury.

For the past week or so, I've been checking out POPmonitor, a freestanding email utility that lets you check your mail box, preview messages, and delete messages from the server without downloading them. And best of all, to bounce unwanted messages back to the sender. "There. Take that, you miserable scum-suckers."

Unfortunately, quite a few of the fake bounces bounce right back at you, but I figure it's still worth a shot, and I'll be interested to see whether after a few weeks of bouncing messages, the volume of spam will diminish at all.

When first you launch POPmonitor, the Configuration Assistant will help you configure your first account. Then you just login to your mailbox, select the unwanted messages and click Delete. The new 2.0 version of POPmonitor also lets you bounce messages and automate the removal of spam by creating custom filters. You can also automate the removal of unwanted messages by creating lists of trusted and blocked senders and by creating custom filters based on several criteria.

You can configure POPmonitor to automatically delete messages from blocked senders or automatically delete messages that match any filter, and set POPmonitor to switch to your email application after POPmonitor has checked and filtered your mailbox. POPmonitor will first remove any unwanted messages from your mailbox and then tell your email application to receive the remaining messages.

You can display selected messages in separate windows. POPmonitor will not show the entire message; it just downloads part of it. You can specify the size of the downloaded part in the Account Settings window under Read X lines of the message body.

You can also save selected messages to your hard disk.

To bounce messages, click the bounce button, and the the selected message(s) will be sent back to the sender, thereby simulating a non-existing email address. POPmonitor will send a message saying that your email account no longer exists on your ISP's server.

POPmonitor can also act as an automatic filter between your ISP's mailbox and your email application, check and filter your mailbox at scheduled intervals, and afterwards instruct your email application to receive the remaining messages.

The POPmonitor application is a relatively modest 3 MB in size, but it wants at least 5 MB of memory with Virtual Memory turned on, and it prefers 7.5 MB (or 8.8 MB with VM turned off), which might be a caveat if you don't have a lot of RAM.

I've found it rock-stable and unbuggy so far. It works great.

System requirements:

Any Macintosh computer with a PowerPC processor
A connection to the Internet or a local network
Mac OS 8.x, Mac OS 9.x (This version of POPmonitor runs in Classic mode under Mac OS X. An OS X native version will be available in May.)
AppleScript (to communicate with your email application)

POPmonitor includes a 19-page user's manual and troubleshooting guide in PDF format.

POPmonitor is $25 shareware. The unregistered version of POPmonitor lets you create one mail account, three trusted senders, three blocked senders and three custom filters. After registering you can create an unlimited number of each.

Charles Moore has been a freelance journalist since 1987 and began writing for Mac websites in May 1998. His The Road Warrior column is a regular feature on MacOpinion, and he is a news editor and columnist at Applelinks.com. If you find his articles helpful, please consider making a donation to his tip jar.

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