edwards.org · December 2006

The Grinch who stole free speech? Here’s a clip from MSNBC regarding Newt Gingrich:

“This is a serious long-term war,” the man [Gingrich] at the podium cried, “and it will inevitably lead us to want to know what is said in every suspect place in the country.”

Some in the audience must have thought they were hearing an arsonist give the keynote address at a convention of firefighters.

This was the annual Loeb First Amendment Dinner in Manchester, N.H. — a public cherishing of freedom of speech — in the state with the two-fisted motto “Live Free Or Die.”

And the arsonist at the microphone, the former speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, was insisting that we must attach an “on-off button” to free speech.

Watch Keith Olbermann speak his mind to Newt Gingrich, or Read the transcript, “Free speech and the delusion of grandeur,” if you can’t watch the video below:

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This is a free plug-in for Spamihilator that my cousin wrote a couple of years ago. Although he now uses a gateway-based anti-spam product he still maintains the plug-in code when people send in bug reports or suggestions for new features.

Note: Bug reports and suggestions should now be posted as comments to this post.

DOWNLOAD “A BLACKLIST FILTER” V0.9.0

Note that the next version will be v0.9.7. So far nearly 100 hours have been spent writing new code to bring Blacklist Filter from v0.8.0 to v0.9.7 !!! This is a tremendous effort and doesn’t include the hundreds of hours spent developing the original plugin!

The new version 0.9.7 might include an advanced caching option, far beyond what was present in the briefly released v0.9.0; many, many more bug fixes; many performance improvements, and greatly improved spam detection capabilities. What is included depends entirely on how much time can be spent on writing free code as opposed to working on other project to earn money. This is up to you, the thousands of users of this plugin!

We would greatly appreciate any donation you can send to help fund continued development of some truly exciting new features. Please donate via PayPal using the Donate button below! Donors can also receive early releases of future versions of this and other plugins!

Latest version: Blacklist Filter v0.9.0 (released Dec 2006)

Feature Summary

Filters all IP addresses listed in each message header
Filters all URLs listed in each message body
Decodes all encoded URLs
Checks all IP addresses and URLs against third-party blacklist service databases
Filters out all email with blacklisted IP addresses or URL domain names or spoofed addresses
Caches DNS blacklist queries to enhance performance
Automatically tunes its performance based on statisitical tracking
Automatically disables blacklist servers when they cease to exist or when they become unreachable
Shows which blacklist services work better than others based on the spam you receive
Provides user-defineable domain name whitelists and blacklists that use pattern matching in URLs to act as exceptions that override third-party blacklist service databases
Filters out all email that contain domains that match user-defined blacklist exception patterns
Passes through all email that contain domains that match user-defined whitelist exception patterns
Allows the user to specific a list of complete or partial IP addresses that will not be checked against blacklists when parsing email headers. This features allows you to bypass blacklist checking for mail servers that might inadvertantly become listed in a blacklist database.
Allows the user to define the spam probability percentage value returned by the plugin.
Allows the user to determine whether a potential spam message is moved to the Recycle Bin or the Training Area.
Comes with complete documentation in the help file

Version history:

v0.9.0:
- fixed bug where some email headers caused false positive detection of spoofed addresses;
– fixed a problem where certain chars in email headers might cause inaccurate detection;
– fixed bugs in the “Test Server” option that tests blacklist servers for operability;
– added user-requested feature that allows specific IP addresses to be excluded from blacklist checks
– added user-requested feature to allow caching of DNS blacklist queries for faster performance
0.8.0 – fixed a minor problem where IP addresses prefixed by an @ sign in mail headers were not parsed properly; fixed a broken link in the Help/About section
0.7.9 – added user-requested feature to select whether potential spam is sent to the Recycle Bin or Training Area
0.7.8 – adjusted URL parsing and log file viewer
0.7.7 – initial public release

If you’d like to donate to help support plugin development then your support will be greatly appreciated!