Spam Analysis Tool Copyright (C) Moose O'Malley, -------------------- September 2007. +===========================================================+ | T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S | +===========================================================+ | * Introduction | * Installing and Using this Program : | * Uninstalling this Program : | * The Future | * Reviews / Awards / CDs | * Freeware Information | * Warranty | * Amendment History | * Contacting the Program's Author +===========================================================+ Introduction : -------------- Spam Analysis Tool for Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, etc. This program is free software. Anyone - any person, any company, or any business - can use this program for free. No fees or payment is required. See "Freeware Information" below. This tool is especially designed for use by Mail System Administrators, or anyone else who runs an email server or wants to block spam / junk emails. N.B. This is probably NOT the sort of program that novice PC users will find very useful. SPAM (i.e unsolicited junk email) is a rotten scurge that is annoying millions of internet users and causing all sorts of havoc due to clogged mail boxes and clogged servers, not to mention the nasty payloads (viruses, trojans, etc) that many spam emails contain. Most email clients (such as Outlook) allow you to save emails to your harddisk with the headers intact. e.g. in Outlook, simply drag and drop the spam emails to a directory on your harddisk. (Do not open them or run any programs they contain). Once saved to your harddrive with the email headers intact, these spam emails can be analysed so that their real source can be identified, and then all emails from this source can be blocked in the future. Doing this will help reduce the volumes of spam that you receive in the future. Spam Analysis Tool enables you to : - Step through directories full of spam email, - View just the email headers or the entire email, - View each spam email's contents with colour coding - Select text (such as IP addresses, email addresses, etc) at the click of the mouse button, and add these to a list of unique items (which can be incorporated into a block file), - And do various other things. See "Using this Program" below for further information. Developed using 32-bit Delphi. Spam Analysis Tool will **NOT** run under Windows 3.x (even with Win32 installed) !! Using this Program : -------------------- To use this program, simply unzip it to a directory (using PKUNIP, WinZIP, or similar), run it, and drag and drop spam email files and then click on the buttons to perform the various activities that you require. If you want the program to run automatically when Windows starts up, then select this option under the "File" menu in the program. If you would like to be able to run this program by clicking on an icon in the Windows Start Menu, or on the Desktop, etc then you can use the "Create Shortcut ..." options under the program's File menu. If you want this program to be "Always On Top" of other Windows, then select the "Always On Top" menu option under the "File" menu. Spam Analysis Tool enables you to : - Step through a directories full of spam email, - View just the email headers or the entire email, - View each spam email's contents with colour coding - Select text (such as IP addresses, email addresses, etc) at the click of the mouse button, and add these to a list of unique items (which can be incorporated into a block file), - And do various other things. In addition, to help you process / analyse spam emails, you can : - Drag and Drop selected files and/or directories of spam email files via Windows Explorer, - Drag and Drop selected spam email files from inside ZIP files. and any unique files (with unique drive, directory, and file name) will be added to the list of files in the program. You can then step through these, select IP addresses or Email addresses, and add these to the list of "Interesting (Unique) Items", and this list can then be used to create a "block" file on the email server that rejects all email from these sources in the future. The spam email's contents are "colour coded" as follows : - "Received" tags are coloured blue, - "Message-Id" tags are coloured green, - And, finally, any text that is already in the "Interesting Items" list is colour coded red. This makes it easy to see what is already in the "Interesting Items" list. In addition to the above, you can also use the buttons provided in the program to : *** File List : - Add all of the files contained in a directory that you select, - Remove the currently selected file from the list, - Erase the list of files, and, - Copy the file list to Window's Clipboard. *** File Contents : - Move to the first, previous, next or last file in the list, - Copy the displayed file's contents to Windows Clipboard, - Paste data / text from Windows Clipboard (so that you can analyse this as well. N.B. this does NOT change any file or affect any file's contents. *** Interesting Items : - Add the selected text (i.e. the selected file contents) to the list of Interesting (Unique) Items. - Delete the selected item(s) from the list of Interesting Items. - Copy the list of Interesting Items to Window's Clipboard. - Paste a list of items from Window's Clipboard and add these to the list of Interesting (Unique) Items and weed out any duplicates. - Erase the list of Interesting Items. Uninstalling this Program : --------------------------- At the present time, there is No Uninstall function. If you ever want to delete this program from your computer, then : 1. Exit the program, and delete it from wherever you installed it on your harddrive. Simple as that ! Before deleting the program, you should turn off the auto-running of this program under Windows - if you have previously enabled it. Simply, re-select the option under the File Menu in the program to achieve this. The Future : ------------ In the future, many improvements could be made to this program, such as : - More tags / more colour coding options. - The ability to remove multiple files from the list of files at once. - Automatic scanning of emails to build a unique list of all of the (for example) IP addresses that they contain. - Ability to extract ALL email headers from all emails in the list and display these is a large text file. - The ability to auto-save the "Interesting Items" list every nn seconds or every nn adds / deletes. - The ability to automatically ignore / skip files with certain file extensions. e.g. ignore / skip .EXE, .DLL, etc files. - The ability to ignore / reject / remove duplicate files by their file name. i.e. ignore the drive + directory when determining duplicates. - The ability to ignore / reject / remove duplicate files by their file contents. i.e. ignore the drive + directory + file name when determining duplicates. - Add in a halt / stop loading this file button - useful if you accidentally add a huge file to the file list. - Anything else ? If you would like any of these improvements, or would like to suggest more, please email me and let me know. How much more work I do on this program depends entirely on what support I get, how many people use the program, what feedback I get, etc. Special Greetings / Thanks to : ------------------------------- - Murray Hinton came up with the idea of colour coding the text that is already in the "Interesting Items" list red while the program was still in the early stages of development. This was a very "user friendly" enhancement to the program. Thanks for the suggestion Murray !! :) Reviews / Awards / CDs : ------------------------- None so far. Freeware Information : ----------------------- This is free software. Anyone - any person, any company, or any business - can use this program for free. No fees or payment is required. However, if you find the program useful, then please consider making a PayPal donation to support my efforts. (To make a donation, please run the program and select the "About" option under the Help menu, and then click the PayPal link on the "About" screen). Warranty : ---------- This software and the accompanying files are provided "as is" and without warranties as to performance or merchantability or any other warranties whether expressed or implied. The user assumes the entire risk of using this software. If you do find any faults with this program, email me and let me know. Amendment History : -------------------- Vers Date Description 0.6 07-Nov-2003 Email Private BETA to CQU's ITD Staff (Adrian Y and Roy G) for review. 0.7 10-Nov-2003 Add in the "Next File containing No Interesting Items" button / functionality. Add in the ability to Auto-Save the Interesting Items List after every change to the list. Email Private BETA to CQU's ITD Staff (Troy S) for review. (52,765 lines of code / comments.) N.B. Originally, this program was going to be FREEWARE, or at least FREE for use by CQU staff to help CQU deal with the mountains of spam that is bombarding their mail servers. However, I've decided to release this program as FREEWARE so that anyone and everyone canb join the fight against spam. 0.9 17-Nov-2003 Add in a tool tip bar at the bottom of the window to make it easier to read the tool tips (i.e. bubble help) on buttons, etc. Carry out final pre-release testing. 1.0 3-Dec-2003 First Public Release. (52,796 lines of code / comments.) 1.0f 3-Sep-2007 This program is now FREEWARE - see "Freeware Information" above. If this program was not downloaded from my Home Page, then it is possibly an old version. The latest version of this program is available from my WEB page - see below. Mike "Moose" O'Malley ____________________________________________________ Moose's Software Valley - Established July, 1996. WEB: http://move.to/moose ____________________________________________________