Fighting Spam
I just received this spam email… As you can see $PRENOM$ was not replaced by my first name, which would have made the email SO much more attractive! 
Digging into the email itself I saw that it links to bp50.net which shares a mailhost with np6.com, which, sure enough, is listed as a bulk advertising sender and blacklisted.
If I ever move to Lotus Notes, I think the first thing I am going to do is plug in JRules and write some email scanning and blacklist checking rules. Maybe they can be hosted online somewhere, so like-minded people can share them? Don’t you get tired of this stuff too?
Tags: spam
December 10th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
Hi daniel,
Having gone through the outlook to notes conversion myself back at IBM Ascential, it’s a painful process. I pray you don’t have to change to notes. It’s funny you mention writing a plugin for notes. A few years back said tabet and I thought about writing a plugin for netscape to filter out spam. Neither of us ever got around to doing it
December 10th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
I think thats a great idea - to share the rules. Could be done as a collaborative repository using atom or rss for clients to subscribe to the latest spam rules (probably has been tried, but still a good idea !).
December 11th, 2008 at 2:41 am
Hi Dan,
When you’re ready to do that, I’m ready to help out.
I could finally replace some pretty ugly Entourage and Applescript filtering with something a bit nicer.
Jon…
December 12th, 2008 at 9:40 am
Hey Jon!
I should have mentioned that for a while I was using JRules to file my Outlook email (hey, not my choice!) using the Java API from Myosoft — http://www.moyosoft.com/joc/. It sorta, kinda worked but the integration between Java and Outlook was a bit kludgey. It was incredibly nice to see all your filing rules in a single Decision Table and to be able to detect conflicts between them though!
Incidentally I also tried calling ILOG Rules for .NET from Outlook 2003, expecting integration to be better, but ironically if anything it was even harder. I think the later versions of Outlook may have fixed that… Search for: http://www.google.com/search?q=Outlook+.NET+integration+shim if you want the gory details on the differences between the COM and the .NET lifecycle and to step back into reference counting hell.
If I remember right, ALL Outlook 2003 plugins must use the same version of the .NET framework, and you get to use whichever version was loaded by the “first” plugin. Nice, huh?
January 1st, 2009 at 7:19 pm
Greetings:
I talked with a guy two weeks ago who used to write anti-spam stuff like that. I’ll ask him if he wants to be involved and let him answer this.
Meanwhile, Windows probably would rather that you use one or the other of their two rulebases for anything connected with them. Contact Karl Reich at MicroSoft for more information on the two rulebased products.
SDG
jco