Version: 1.0.5, by y2ksw
Developer Last Online: Feb 2023
Category: Administrative and Maintenance Tools -
Version: 3.7.x
Rating:
Released: 10-17-2008
Last Update: 10-23-2008
Installs: 10
Uses Plugins
Translations Is in Beta Stage
No support by the author.
This product is a natural evolution of many single solutions. It is an attempt to integrate in vBulletin the features other applications have, without requiring a lot of code, and without obviously giving the code to the spammers.
With this software, your board connects to one of the most powerful email checking engines available. The engine itself is maintained remotely and can currently be accessed at the production server. After debugging and wide-scale test, it will be moved to vbulletin.it.
Please read first the included help before installing!
BETA RELEASE
1.0.4: FIX misplaced bracket 1.0.5 More reliable connections and a few new options, updated help. This version should be the last one before release.
What exactly is it connecting to? Something along the lines of SpamAssassin?
Why would someone make themselves dependent on an external resource?
What happens to a new post of your service is not available?
I'm not bashing you, just trying to ask some educated questions.
If you'd rather PM details to me that is fine. Thanks!
-Raymond
It's connecting to Spamhaus, and if not available or overloaded, to alternate services. It has also a local database where known spammers are cached for some time.
If somebody was so badly spammed as some of my servers (hundreds of spammers and tens of thousands of posts), and any service would help me to get rid of them, I would choose it. I have made my research and found that nothing exists which compares to SpamAssasin, and so I coded the connection to those databases. Also I added some of the features I had already, such as the local spammer database and formal email checking. All together they do a really good job.
New posts are not affected, only new users.
Please feel free to ask, I will reply to all questions, all but the exact coding
Can you elaborate a bit more. You say it is the ultimate spambot killer, but in what way? in bots spamming or in bots registering?
what does it do with the spam, etc. how do I know it is not removing legit posts, etc. we need more detail.
It does not allow to register spam bots and notoriously known spammers from certain IP's.
If a user registers, it's email (and optionally IP) is compared to the local database (mine) first and if a match was found, rejected.
Flow:
An incoming email address is formally checked and rejected if invalid.
If no IP match was found, it connects to the world-wide spammer databases in a certain order, and if there is a match, the IP is stored locally and the user email rejected.
If the email address apears not to exist (MX lookup & initiation of email transmit, quit before sending), the user email is stored to the local database and will be rejected.
If none of the above applies, the user may register. At this point it is sure the email account is not coming from a known spammer and the address is really valid.
for a known spammer, and anything else for valid or invalid email addresses. If no IP is specified, the IP test against the world-wide databases is not performed.
If the emal is invalid, a blank page or 0 is returned. If the service is manually down, a negative value is shown. If the email is valid, a 1 is shown.