Date: Mon, 30 Nov 1998
Organization: First Online Church of "Bob"
We are *still* working on getting that little rat-fuck who insists on spewing forged garbage into alt.slack. Do not despair, we WILL prevail! But for those of you who prefer genuine SubGenius alt.slack garbage, a spam filter exists for all of you with newsreaders that do not filter spam! I've installed it for use with Free Agent, and it works like a charm. The software is Nfilter, and it is a FREE program written for those of us who are too broke (or cheeap) to pay megabucks for software with killfiles, filters, and other fancy doodads like that. You can find it at:
http://www.iol.ie/~mburkley/nfilter/nfilter.html
The software is written for Windows 95/98/NT PCs.
Here is how I got Nfilter to work on my PC:
1) Download the software: nfilter.exe and nfilter.dat. (The nfilter.dat file is a text file, and can be edited with any text editor such as Notepad.)
2) Put it in its own directory, c:\nfilter
3) Insert the following line into the top of the nfilter.dat file with your text editor:
alt.slack drop organization:*newscene*
4) Look at Free Agent. In the Options menu, under General Preferences, select "System." Write down the address of the news server, such as: news.myisp.com
5) Change the news server listed there in Free Agent to: localhost
6) Create a Shortcut in your Internet folder to run the filter, using a command line with the news server name you had written down from the Free Agent news server line. The command line should look like this: c:\nfilter\nfilter news.myisp.com
7) When you're online, BEFORE you run Free Agent, launch NFilter with the shortcut. Minimize it and keep it running.
8) Run Free Agent. Voila! Forged spam has been filtered out!
NON-TECHNICAL EXPLANATION OF HOW IT WORKS:
When you download new message headers on alt.slack through Free Agent with Nfilter, you will see that the message headers download a lot slower. That's because Nfilter is reading the message headers as they download, and dumping the ones that are spam.
When you set Free Agent to run "localhost" as its news server, that means it does not connect directly to your ISP. NFilter is designed so that it will serve as "localhost." This means that the message headers download from your ISP into Nfilter, and Free Agent is getting the messages from Nfilter instead of directly from your ISP.
Now here's the important part: AS THE SPAMMER TRIES TO HIDE HIS SPAM, YOU CAN CHANGE YOUR FILTERS SO YOU CAN STILL BLOCK THE SPAM!
Nfilter will allow you to block messages based on ANY header you want to block. Right now, all of the forged spam seems to be setting its Organization: header to "Newscene." So right now, Nfilter is blocking all messages on alt.slack that have "newscene" in the Organization: header. (The *'s in the nfilter.dat file are wildcards.) If this changes, you simply have to change the filter from "newscene" to whatever the new spam turns out to be.
You can also set it to block out messages based on the NNTP-Posting-Host header, or any messages cross-posted to a certain newsgroup (such as alt.animals.dolphins), or to block out any particular user who pisses you off (such as the net.kooks).
While you can modify your filters in the nfilter.dat file at any time, the filter program itself cannot be changed as it is running. If you want to make your changes immediately, you'll have to stop running the filter (bring up Nfilter and Ctrl-C to stop running it), then launch it once again.
And finally, if you haven't figured this out:
YOU CAN USE NFILTER ON ANY NEWSGROUP, NOT JUST ALT.SLACK. So if you want to sort through the spam in alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica or alt.revisionism, you can do it with Nfilter!
--
Reverend Modemac (modemac@shell1.tiac.net) First Online Church of ?
http://www.tiac.net/users/modemac/
Original file name: Nfilter- A Spam Filter for
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