New plugin: Outgoing Friends

[AlexV]

Apologies for writing in English, but my German is not good enough.

This isn't technically a plugin, but does interact with Spamihilator anyway.

The idea here is that anyone I send an email to is not a spammer, so what this utility does is scan every outgoing email and adds all the recipients to the Spamihilator Friends list. It does this by using EmailRelay to act as an SMTP proxy, in much the same way as Spamihilator is behaving as a POP proxy.

You configure your email client to use localhost as an SMTP server, and configure this utility with your actual SMTP server details.

Ideally, of course, this SMTP proxying functionality would be built in to Spamihilator, but as it is not, this will do the job.

An Installer/Uninstaller is provided. The .net CLR runtimes are required (the installer will give you the option to download and install them if they are missing).

Source code in C# (and NSIS for the installer) is included.

I hope you find this useful, and comments and suggestions are always welcome. Once I'm happy that people are finding it stable and bug-free, I'll list it in the Plugins section of the website.

OutgoingFriends-0.8.exe

Alex

[michel]

Hi!

Thank you for your add-on! Just two questions:

1) Is it correct, that your add-on only supports one SMTP server?
2) How do you get the correct path to "spamihilator.ini"?

By the way: When you publish your add-on on the Spamihilator website it will be listed under "Plugins" automatically. I will put it into "Add-Ons" manually later.

Regards,
Michel

[AlexV]

Hello,

1) Yes, it does only support one SMTP server. I had not thought of using more than one. Unfortunately, because of the way EmailRelay works, it can only support one per server, but what I can look into to have servers running on different ports.

For example, you could have a forwarder to mail.serverone.com running on localhost:10025 and a forwarder to mail.servertwo.com running on localhost:10026. This would probably be quite difficult to understand and have configured correctly, but if people need to use multiple servers, it would be the only thing I could think of.

It would be nice to be able to specify the server name as part of the username, like Spamihilator does, but EmailRelay doesn't support that, and I don't intend to write my own SMTP proxy right now.

2) The path to Spamihilator.ini is determined as follows: First, find the registry key "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Spamihilator". If it doesn't exist, then assume Spamihilator is not installed, and display an error. Otherwise, check for the value "ConfigDir".

If that does not exist, or has the value 1, then Spamihilator.ini is in the program folder. To find the program folder, the value "InstallDir" is read.

If it does exist, and has the value 0, then Spamihilator.ini is in the local settings folder. To find it, the ApplicationData system folder is found, and the "Spamihilator" subfolder of that is used.

I think this covers all eventualities, but if there is anywhere it can live that I have missed, please let me know!

Thanks,

Alex

[anbuva]

Hallo AlexV!

Thank you for your new plugin !

Regards
anbuva

[Chactory]

Hi to all,

thanks to AlexV for his creative plugins!

But do I have to install and configure EmailRelay and OutgoingFriends-0.1.exe? This seems slightly complicated to me.

Until now, I have used the settings in my mail client for this purpose. When activated, it collects the adresses of everybody I'm sendig mails to, and after this I would import my adress book into the friends list.

Regards, Chactory

[anbuva]

Hallo Chactory!

I think it too. This will be complicated for most and cause new problems. Perhaps Alex can adjust a Tutorial here ....
I must confess that I am taking distance of this also at the moment . Otherwise he was really creative, because we didn't have something like that here yet.

Regards
anbuva

[AlexV]

Hello Chactory,

No, you do not have to install and configure EmailRelay. This is handled internally by OutgoingFriends, and it should be invisible to you. I provide the link for information only.

I do not think it will be too complicated to install OutgoingFriends, I have put a lot of work into automating as much as possible in the installer and the program itself. All it requires is to be given your SMTP server settings, as I have not written any automated way of detecting these from your existing email client.

Of course, if you are happy to continue doing the job manually, that is fair enough.

Regards,

Alex Vallat
Edit: it seems that the word beginning with c in the phrase "to give c----- to" is forbidden by the forum, presumably for spam avoidance.

[Chactory]

Hi AlexV!

Thank you for your explanation. Now it seems far easier to me to work with your intelligent plugin.

For me, it will still be easier to import my adressbook into Spamihilator or to rightclick on a sender in the training area ...

Please don't feel discouraged by my comment, surely many of the Spamihilator users will appreciate your new plugin.

And: Excuse me for the automatic policy violation entry by phpBB in your posting, it's because I censored some spam words, therein "credit". But now I guess I should delete this word from the list ... (EDIT: Done.)

Gruß, Chactory

[anbuva]

Hallo AlexV!

Do I see this right? I cannot configure this PlugIn in Spami. I must start it manually...However, could be up to my system (Windows Vista).

Regards
anbuva

[AlexV]

Thank you for your comments, Chactory, it is good to know both when my work is useful to people, and also when it is not! I, personally, am very bad at keeping an address book up to date, and can quite easily reply to an email or send a new email without having the address in the address-book, or remembering to add it to the friends list. I found I could, on occasion, miss the replies to these emails as they were incorrectly marked as spam. This add-on was made to help with that frustration.

anbuva: Yes, you are correct, this is not a plugin to Spamihilator, so it does not appear in the plugins list. It communicates with Spamihilator by directly modifying the friends list in Spamihilator.ini.

Regards,

Alex

[AlexV]

Well, it's been a week, and I've had no bug reports so far. Either it works perfectly, or no-one is interested!

In either case, I shall now upload it to the Plugins section, and hopefully Michel can move it to Add-Ons when he gets a moment.

I've also updated to 0.2, but the change is just to make the Readme file more accessible - the functionality is the same.

[anbuva]

Hallo AlexV!

I must confess honestly to you that I couldn't test it yet. We still had here a couple of other problems, which I had to take care first.

Regards
anbuva

[michel]

Hi AlexV!

You did not upload the addon yet, did you?

Regards,
Michel

[AlexV]

Yes, I have. Its entry is here: Outgoing Friends

It looks like at least 3 people liked it :-)

Alex

[michel]

Hi!

Sorry, I missed that. I just moved your add-on to "Add-Ons" and also pushed it so it appears as updated on the main plugin page for another five days.

Thanks,
Michel