Version History
March 21,
2006 Aspam 1.4 – allow to specify mailing list tags
October
2004 Aspam 1.3 – Add /auto option to run automatically when started
April 12,
2004 Aspam 1.2 – optimised keyword detection (v.i.ag.r.a and such)
February 9,
2004 Aspam 1.1 – divers minor bugfixes
November
30, 2003 ASpam 1.0 beta released
Download latest
version
How ASpam was created
I have been
a pretty pacific Internet user since the late 1980's. Since early 1992, I have
been using the same personal email address, werner@cstb.fr, and I have been responsible for
several hotlines using email.
In the
beginning, I found the occasional advertisements coming in by email amusing,
some even interesting. Lately (around the year 2000), however, the number of
Spam emails increased drastically, and at the point where I got more Spam than
actual mail, I started to be a little annoyed. I started to spend
non-negligible time sorting emails. At one point, a technician dealing
part-time with
Now I saw
Spam as a real problem. We could not easily change the email address of our
hotline, and that would only postpone the problem - we wish this address to be
known as widely as possible.
What really
made me spring to action was an email I received one morning, saying,
"Seek of Spam ? Click here !". That did it. I decided to refuse being
taken hostage by a bunch of illiterate (I only found out later that some of
them are illiterate by strategy, to fool anti-spam programs), brainless (if
they had a brain, they would use it to do something creative to make a living)
jerks (yes, I was pissed off). I
decided to fight for my privacy, and conquer my email address back.
Paying for
an existing anti-spam tool was out of the question: I was sick of Spam, but not
to the point of risking to pay the people who are part of the problem.
The
existing free tools did not seduce me. None of them really satisfied all my criteria for anti-Spam tools, and I decided to make my
own.
Its not
that I am consequently against any form of advertising by email. But blindly harvesting
email addresses off the Internet and sending out millions of emails at the same
time is definitely not a nice thing to do.
In the
meantime, laws have been passed in several countries, but the Internet being
what it is, few has changed.
Getting rid
of Spam and contributing to it being wiped off the Internet, conquering back
email as it used to be is not just a matter of comfort and saving time. It has
become a crusade against ruthless people who have ethics that I cannot accept.
Therefore I decided to package and distribute ASpam for free.
An ideal world
Spam is the
cancer of the Internet.
But imagine
for a second, most Internet users would run a program like ASpam. What would
happen ?
Most people
would not see most of the Spam. As a consequence, sending Spam would no longer
be profitable, and the spamming level would considerably drop – Spammers are
mostly people who try to make a living out of this type of advertisement. If
nobody would ever react to Spam email, it would quickly loose its justification
for being.
Spam exist
because people react to it. There are Web
sites explaining about the general anti-spam strategy and philosophy (also
in French), or how to hide your email
address on your Web pages. You can also fight back :‘catch’ Spammers and
fill their data bases with junk (like they fill your mailbox with junk).
However,
these solution do not give immediate relief, and my personal experience made me
sceptic towards everything reputedly ‘coming soon’, ‘ideal’, ‘faultless’ or
‘perfect’. ASpam was a quick hack, but at least for me, it solved the problem
immediately.
My criteria for anti-spam software
1. The tool
should be autonomous: Once configured, Spam should be reliably deleted. Looking
through a list of 'tagged' messages is not an interesting option, because
either the time required is of the same order of magnitude as the time needed
to sort incoming mail manually. Or you do it only from time to time, and accept
to loose important email arbitrarily.
2. It is
not acceptable to loose a single, important email. If email is deleted by a
tool (and not a human), the sender (not the recipient, see above) of the
message should be notified. No program will ever be 100 % reliable. If it makes
a mistake, it must not be potentially fatal to its owner.
3. It
should cause the least possible trouble to its users. Therefore, it should
recognize known (trusted) users, making sure their email gets through. Adding
new users to
Last
Update: 21/03/2006