On Sat, 12 Apr 2008 18:38:38 +1200, Quentin Grady posted:
>
>G'day G'day Larry,
>
> You went to a lot of effort to provide me with an excellent
>solution to my problems by recommending nfilter. Like anyone who
>puts in the effort you are likely to be wondering if I've taken your
>advice and how it is going.
Thanks for responding. It is nice to know that my efforts didn't just
go into the bit bucket.
>Well went to the nfilter site and looked to see if it was compatible
>with Windows XP. Windows XP wasn't listed and that made me wary.
>Especially now the originator of the software no longer supports it.
I run XP, and have also used nfilter on Windows 2000. The support is
not a really big deal, for a few reasons. First is that it does a
creditable job of filtering, and has not proven to be buggy in any way
I've noticed. The second is that the source code is available, and
there are folks working with it. This means that there are a few
improved versions out there, though you do have to be somewhat careful
to choose your download sites carefully if you want to upgrade.
In fact, I have made a slight modification of the source code I got
from nfilter.org, to do something I find quite useful. When you run
nfilter, you can bring up a window to view the "dropped articles"
information. Unfortunately, it only tells you that it dropped one,
which one it was by reference number, and which rule caused it to be
dropped.
The problem with stating which rule it used is that it is reported as
a rule number, which becomes very hard to find in the nfilter.dat
file, because of the comment lines. My modification saves a file
called "RuleSet.txt" that contains all rules, in order, each one
beginning with "Filter n".
I may get around to changing the output of the "dropped articles" view
to better identify the article too, but it's low priority.
>I've had a few things go wrong with my computer and didn't want to add
>to them. Secondly I figured the latest version of Agent should be
>able to do most of the filtering I required. It had to be a matter of
>my not fully exploiting its potential. The cross posting issue hasn't
>bothered me much recently for some reason. Whatever. Up until now I
>had been filtering by author etc This of course doesn't work with the
>crowd who change addressed for each spam of Nike, cheap wholesale
>fake Rolex. (Some people won't be reading this post if they filter
>the entire post for such key words) I discovered that I could filter
>for those key words without Subject or Author. Most of my problems
>disappeared.
To give you an example (forgive me if this was already obvious to you
from y previous raving), I have the following filter in nfilter.dat.
* flag:[SPAM-cheap] subject:*[Cc][Hh][Ee][Aa][Pp].*
This one flags ant posting with the word "cheap" in the subject line,
regardless of whether or not any of the word is in upper or lower
case. It will flag any post with "cheap", Cheap", or "cHeAP"
Note that it does not drop the article. I just had a look through my
headers, and see that it flagged one, which read:
"Hot ! ! ! china discount cheap mauri sneakers nike james air force
ones mid cut AF1 shoes etc"
and it now shows up as:
"[SPAM-cheap] Hot ! ! ! china discount cheap mauri sneakers nike james
air force ones mid cut AF1 shoes etc"
So, if I see [SPAM-cheap], all I have to do is take a look at the
subject line and not bother reading it. Since I am not any more
interested in the reaction of other posters to the spam, I won't be
interested in anything with that subject. But since you might not want
to take the chance that someone didn't reply with information about
his peripheral neuropathy worsening while wearing discount shoes, you
always have the option of looking inside the post.
The flip side of this sort of filter is that you don't drop articles
with a subject like "Quentin's book would be cheap at twice the price"
>However your post has drawn my attention to the benefits I could be
>enjoying when I get a technowhiz to safely talk me through setting up
>nfilter.
Be glad to walk you (and anyone else) through it, and to supply you
with some working filters.
>So the quick summary is that it hasn't happened yet but it definitely
>could.
--
Larry, T2, Saskatchewan, Canada.
DX 24 Aug 07. D&E
Metformin 2000mg,
Ramipril, Simvastatin
Dx A1c 8.1 : Latest 5.1 (4 Mar 08)
Re: what IS it with these damned spammers! 
Linear Mode
