Frequently
Asked Questions
Q: I was
told sending back mail to spammers is a bad idea, because this ‘confirms’ your
email address and you get even more Spam then.
A: This can
actually happen. Spammers might try to collect such ‘confirmed’ addresses to
sell them. However, ASpam does not send back any information about your email
in its automatic replies. Therefore, the Spammer’s programs will not be able to
‘recognize’ that this mail came from you. Also, if you are scared about this
phenomenon, you can switch the automatic notification off. According to my
experience, however, having this option on doesn’t change the amount of
incoming spam significantly. Anyway, you choose.
Q: Most
senders do not even leave a valid return address, neither in the return path of
the mail neither in the body (as a link to click on). When ASpam’s auto-reply
function is on, this will create a huge queue of ‘undeliverable mails’ on the
mail server.
A: This,
too, does happen. However, according to my personal experience, you need to
receive astronomical amounts of this kind of Spam for it to cause any resource
problems: The return messages are very small ASCII text messages. The mail
server will simply discard them after a fixed period of time. In case you do
have resource problems, you could ask the administrator of the mail server to
simply reduce this time. I’ve never seen this problem in reality though (please
let me know if you do). And 5 minutes of Internet radio will probably cause ten
times more additional traffic than a lifetime of ASpam use.
Q: When I
used filters in Outlook, some messages where not filtered, even if they
contained the words I checked for. Can you explain that ? Will ASpam catch such
messages ?
A: Fighting
Spam is a little like breaking into computers used to be in the old days: as
anti-spam filters become more popular, spammers get pretty inventive to try and
get around the filters. One frequently used technique is to ‘hide’ messages in
HTML tags. For example, instead of writing ‘Viagra’, they will write
Vi<b>ag<\b>ra . Your mail program ignores the tags, because they do
not have any effect in this context, and the word is displayed as if written in
plain ASCII. ASpam removes all tags before checking against the filter file,
and should catch most of the jerks. (Now its their turn again…)
Q: Oh my
God, the login and password for my email account are stored in clear text in
the aspam.ini file ! Someone might be
able to read my email or send email in my name !!!
A: If
someone you don’t want to read your mail is able to open that aspam.ini file,
you’re probably in deep trouble anyway… If you’re really paranoid about not
having your password stored anywhere, you can delete it from the .ini file, as
well as in the ASpam window before hitting the Exit button (that’s when the
.ini file is updated). But I would really think about how someone would get to
that file first… And any first year student in computer science could send mail
that looks like it was sent by you, using any mailserver. Welcome to reality.
Q: I have
more than one account / I’m a system administrator and would like to run ASpam
on several accounts at the same time. Is it possible ?
A: You can
run several versions of ASpam at the same time, but you’d have to configure
each window separately each time you restart it, because there is only one .ini
file. I consider the possibility of implementing a multi-account version, if
there is sufficient interest. Please let me know if
you are interested.
Q: How does
the checking process work ? Does ASpam
have to download all the mail to sort it ?
A: No, only
the beginning of each message is downloaded. The checking for keywords is
limited to the first 100 lines. That way the sorting process is relatively fast
and can be reasonably used over dial-up connections.
Q:
Notification sending is on, they seem to be send but are not received.
A: Make
sure that the ‘Outgoing server’ name is spelled right. Some providers use
different names for ingoing and outgoing servers. You can get this information
from the settings in your mail program. You can try out sending mail with the ‘Send
mail’ tab in ASpam. Be sure to try with a non-existing address like automatic_message@do_not_reply.com
- that’s what ASpam uses in automatic messages.
Q: Where
can I buy ASpam ?
A: You
can’t, its free. Download it here.
Q: Are you
interested in some real cheap Viagra ?
A: PISS OFF
!!!
Limitations
ASpam cannot currently access
web-based email systems.
Last
Update: 03/12/2003