I am part of a beta-testing group for an anti-spam service called Knuj0n (you have have heard of it, if not, it's at www.knujon.com), therefore it's somewhat in my interest to have spam come through to my mailbox. I have Mozilla Thunderbird set up to access my Gmail using the POP3 protocol, and apparently Gmail isn't set up to allow the spam folder to be downloaded, along with the rest of the mail.
I contacted Gmail regarding this problem, and asked them if there were any "hidden settings" or anything they knew of that would let me download my spam (I currently take the long route and manually save the source of the spam e-mails into .txt format, and ship them off to Knuj0n to be analyzed and reported to the proper authorities). As you can imagine, this is something of a time-consuming process, and I often forget to check the spam folder, because 99% of my mail comes in without a problem, because it's not spam, so sometimes a week or more goes by before I remember to visit gmail.com and access my mailbox via web browser.
My question is, is anyone aware of any third-party software products that would allow me to get the contents my spam folder downloaded into my e-mail client? Coupled with the fact that receiving spam helps me with my beta testing, Thunderbird has a built-in heuristic spam filter, which "learns" what is spam and what is not, based on the out-of-the-box filter rules and the adaptive, "learning" filter; the more spam that comes through, the better it gets trained.
dude is this really worth the hassle? why dont you setup another email account with some ISP, post the email in some newsgroups and webpages and then have the spammers get to work on it?
I think his point is that GMail's SPAM filter is doing too good a job for him, and keeping his beta test from getting massive amounts of spam.
Jesse, Nick is basically right. You need to use an account with no/poor spam protection if you're looking to collect it. There was a company called Blue Security which had an offering called BlueFrog. They've pulled it down now due to attacks by Spammers who didn't like what they were doing (taking the fight back to their wallet), but you can probably find their software still online. They had a Firefox extension that would go through your Spam/Junk folders on webmail clients (Hotmail/Yahoo/GMail) and forward those messages with headers to them. It sounds like this might be something similar to what you'd like to do. If you can, get hands on the extension and modify it for your purposes.
On 8/30/06, Nick K <nikolai.ku...@gmail.com> wrote:
> dude is this really worth the hassle? why dont you setup another email > account with some ISP, post the email in some newsgroups and webpages > and then have the spammers get to work on it?
I am also testing Knujon and have been wondering the same thing. I am not sure but I think that if you mark your spam as not spam then Thunderbird will download from the inbox. I only get one spam per day in my Gmail account and today I have created filters to forward spam to Knujon directly. This may not work if Gmail's spam filters override the filters I created. Should know in a day or two.
> I am also testing Knujon and have been wondering the same thing. I am > not sure but I think > that if you mark your spam as not spam then Thunderbird will download > from the inbox. > I only get one spam per day in my Gmail account and today I have > created filters to forward spam to Knujon directly. This may not work > if Gmail's spam filters override the filters I created. Should know in > a day or two.
Nick, my "spamtrap" e-mail that I use to register for websites and such is over at Hotmail, and it does its job well. My Gmail account is the one I try to keep as private as I can, simply because it's my nicer e-mail box. And I don't consider it a hassle, simply because it needs to be done, and if no one reports it to the SpamCops and Knujon's of the net, then who will? It's an odd tack to take, but it's how I look at it.
Zack, you're close. Gmail does a good job of filtering spam, and part of that is simply that I prefer to keep my Gmail address off the spamming lists as much as I can. I just wish that I could get to the ones that are in the Spam folder without having to check my mail with the browser all the time. POP3 support has spoiled me, I suppose. And my Hotmail account gets more spam, but I have noticed a big reduction since I joined BlueFrog (just after "killthemall" organized the DDoS), and then more when I started with Knujon. SpamCop helps, too.
Mike25, nice to see a fellow tester. Hope your reduction is as good as mine. I've heard about the Thunderbird and Firefox extensions for Knujon, but haven't gotten a chance to get them. I've been on vacation this entire summer, but school is starting soon so I will give them a try when I move in. Filters, I will think about. If it's a 401 or stock scam, I like to report those to the proper authorities as well as the usual places. Being a good netizen, I suppose.
Mike25k wrote: > I think > that if you mark your spam as not spam then Thunderbird will download > from the inbox.
I expect Gmail also uses heuristics, so if you mark your spam as not spam and then download it, you will be training Gmail's filter to do the wrong thing.
I am downloading the spam directly from my Gmail spam folder. To do it:
1. Go to http://www.freepops.org/en/ and install FreePOPs. 2. Make sure you put FreePOPs in your Startup folder so it is always running. It uses very little resources to leave it running. 3. Go to http://www.freepops.org/en/viewplugin.php?plugin=gmail.lua and read about the Gmail.lua plugin. 4. Download this plugin and make sure it is in the FreePOPs Program Files directory with all the other ".lua" files. It may already be there. 5. Set up a separate "Gmail Spam" account in Thunderbird. Under "Server Settings", make sure that you: A. Set the "Server Name" to "localhost" only. B. Set the "Port" to "2000". C. Set "User Name" to "your_a...@gmail.com?folder=spam" where "your_acct" is your Gmail account name. It is critical that you do NOT capitalize any of the letters in the "User Name" field. D. For "Use secure connection", you MUST make sure the "Never" is selected. 6. You will be asked for your password the first time you connect and have the option to have Thunderbird save the password for future connections.
If you follow my instructions above, you should have no problem. Each time you download the spam from your Gmail spam folder, they are moved to the trash folder within Gmail. It should do EXACTLY what you want to do. If you have ANY problem, please let me know through this forum. Stu
here 's a little script i wrote using python and libgmail to report spam from the spam folder in gmail to knuj0n. there 's a link in http://www.knujon.com/howtosend.html#Gmail
Yes, it works on XP. It took a couple of days of trial and error, but it works. I don't know what I did wrong yesterday. It worked like a champ today. One thing I noticed the "usern...@gmail.com?folder=spam" "spam" has to be lower case and you don't have to chose authenticated login. I just ran the Freepops executable and it sits in the system tray. I guess I couldn't figure out the services yesterday. Now, to go see if I can get some more spam. :)