About Spambam 

Spambam is a new program from Molten Lava productions that will free your inbox from all that annoying unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE) AKA Spam. Spambam operates in the background on your PC and it has been designed to operate as transparently as possible.

Where Spambam stands out from the crowd is not only the way it uses three powerful methods of detecting spam, but also the fact that it keeps itself up to date with no user intervention. All you have to do is set it up, lay back, and forget you ever had a problem with spam.

How does Spambam work? Simple, Spambam runs on your PC and acts as a POP3 and SMTP Proxy for your mail client. So instead of connecting to your server to get and send mail, your client connect to Spambam and it gets the mail for you (after making sure it's not spam of course). If Spambam thinks an item of mail is spam it will mark the subject line with the string "[SPAM]", that way you can set your mail client to process the spam however you like. If your client can't filter on the subject of e-mail messages, you can configure Spambam to delete the spam instead (although it will save the spam into a directory just in case).

What does that last paragraph really mean? Easy, you first start Spambam up. Then you start your Inbox and read your mail as usual except that there's suddenly no more spam in your inbox! Of course you have to set Spambam up first, see our Setup Page for more details.

System Requirements

• Windows 95 or NT4.0 (may work on 3.51)
• 1Mb of disk Space.
• Approx 450K of memory is consumed when running.
• Virtually no CPU Cycles when Idle.
• A POP3 and SMTP compliant mail reader.
• A Net connection (sic).

Spam filtering techniques

1. All incoming mail is checked against your Greenlist (this is a list containing the e-mail addresses, domains, Subjects etc that are allowed to send to you). Any matches against your Greenlist are passed directly on to your inbox.
2. Mail not matching the Greenlist is checked against a Blacklist of known spam domains, known spammers, spam mailing programs etc. Any matches are processed as per your specifications.
3. The headers of mail not blacklisted are also checked for common faults and typical attributes of spam. eg. one check (that can be turned off if necessary) is that the To: or CC: header must contain the users e-mail address.

Spam Processing

If Spambam detects that a mail item is spam any of several actions can be taken with it:

1. The Subject can be marked for easy filtering by your mail client eg. "Subject: [SPAM]Make money fast$$$".
2. The mail item can be saved into a directory, and indexed, for later perusal.
3. It can be deleted (not passed on to your inbox)

Features

• Spambam Automatically updates it's Blacklist on startup from the Spambam web site so that you've always got the latest filters. You can easily override any filters, add your own, and merge from many sources on the WWW.
• The current Spambam Blacklist has over 2300 filters.
• Spambam can be set to automatically update it's greenlist from your address book on startup. Currently Flat text, The MS Exchange and Netscape address books are supported.
• Spambam Automatically keeps your Greenlist up to date by adding to it the addresses of everyone you send mail to.
• You can merge any number of files into your Blacklist or Greenlist and Spambam will only add unique entries.
• The way Spambam deals with mail can be fully configured. You can turn on or off particular settings, specify the way Spambam marks the subject of spam etc.
• Spambam can be set to save all spam into a directory (and optionally not pass it on to your inbox). The full headers of each item is saved, and a handy index file in HTML format is created for ease of manual checking.
• The SMTP server Spambam runs can only be connected to from the local machine so your machine can't be hijacked to send spam (useful if you're online all the time).
• Spambam's SMTP and POP3 servers are fully RFC compliant thus they won't cause problems with your mail client (e.g the Internet mail service for MS Exchange)
• Spambam is a commercial grade multi threaded C++ application developed by commercial programmers. It is fast, memory efficient, and consumes no CPU while idle (waiting for a connection). No extra runtimes or DLL's are required.

Availability

As of 4th March 1998 Spambam is downloadable! Visit the Spambam Download Page to get a copy. If you're interested in being notified of Spambam updates and releases you're more than welcome to join the SB-Announce mailing list.

Spambam is distributed as shareware, if you plan to use it please consider registering. Registration only costs $10 and not only will you have the satisfaction of knowing you're contributing to further development of our software, but those nagging dialogs will disappear! Visit the Registration Page for details on how you can be a good net citizen.