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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 writing for Mac websites since May 1998. His The Road Warrior column is a regular feature on MacOpinion, and he is a news editor and columnist at Applelinks.com.
Recent Miscellaneous Ramblings
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- More in the Miscellaneous Ramblings index.
Links for the Day
- Mac of the Day: Clamshell iBook G3/300 MHz, Sep. 1999 - innovative, rugged, heavy, clamshell laptop introduced AirPort and was a huge hit.
- Group of the Day: Mac Pro List is for those using a Mac Pro.
- November 20 in LEM history: 85: Windows 1.0 - 00: Mac dreams - 01: Stop the upgrade insanity - Good people, good software, good business - The digital lifestyle: Text - 06: To AppleCare or not? - One year with my 'free' Mac mini - 07: Why you want to avoid integrated graphics - Problem with Leopard on a MDD
Recent Content on Low End Mac
- Leopard Runs Very Nicely on PowerPC Macs, Simon Royal, Mac Spectrum, 11.19. Some claim that Mac OS X 10.5 is so optimized for Intel Macs that it runs poorly on PowerPC hardware. That's simply not the case.
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- Free Alternatives to Microsoft Office, Simon Royal, Mac Spectrum, 11.17. Microsoft Office is powerful and expensive. OpenOffice provides a full alternative, and Bean and AbiWord are excellent options for word processing.
- DLO Action Jacket for the SanDisk Sansa, Tommy Thomas, Welcome to Macintosh, 11.17. Want to protect your SanDisk Sansa MP3 player on the go? The DLO Action Jacket does a great job.
- More links in our archive.
Recent Deals
- Best iMac G4 Deals, 11.18. Used 15" 700 MHz Combo, $243; 800 MHz, $280; 1 GHz, $380; 17" 1.25 GHz SuperDrive, $400; 20", $549.
- Best MacBook Air Deals, 11.18. New 1.6 80, $1,150 after rebate; 120, $1,744 a/r; 1.8 80, $1,794 a/r; 1.6 128 SSD, $2,150; used 1.8 64 SSD, $1,500; new, $2,200 a/r; 1.86, $2,398 a/r.
- Best Mac OS X 10.0-10.3 Deals, 11.18. Mac OS X 10.0.3, $30; 10.1, $20; 10.2, $60; 10.3 CD, DVD, $100; CD, $119; 10.1 Server, unlimited users, $58; 10.3 Server, unlimited, $150.
- Best iPod nano Deals, 11.17. Refurb 3G/4 GB, $79; new, $114; refurb 8 GB, $99; new, $125; 3G/8 GB, from $134; 16 GB, from $189. Prices include ground shipping.
- Best Titanium PowerBook G4 Deals, 11.17. Used 1 GHz with SuperDrive, $478 plus shipping.
- Best Xserve deals, 11.17. Used G4/1 GHz, $999; G5/2 GHz, $1,288; new 2.0 4-core Xeon, $1,900; refurb 3.0 4-core, $2,599; 2.8 GHz, $2,499; 3.0 8-core, $3,499.
- Best classic iPod Deals, 11.14. Used 30 GB video, $126; 80, $53; refurb 80 classic, $169; new 120 GB, $224; refurb 160 GB, $249; new, $280. New & refurb include shipping.
- Best eMac Deals, 11.14. Used 700 MHz Combo, $120; 800 CD, $170; 1 GHz Combo, $229; SuperDrive, $260; 1.25 Combo, $250; SD, $300; 1.42 Combo, $329.
- Best MacBook Deals, 11.14. Used 1.83 GHz, $595; 2.0 SD, $660; refurb 2.1 GHz, $949; 2.4, $999; black, $1,099; new 2.1, $869 after rebate; 2.4, $1,150 a/r; black, $1,194 a/r; more.
- More deals in our archive.
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