POP3 and spam folder

[Jesse Hathaway]

Hi,

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.

Any ideas, folks?

Thanks,

Jesse Hathaway

[Nick K]

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?

[Zack (Doc)]

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.

[Mike25k]

Hi Jesse

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.

[Zack (Doc)]

In General the filters "hit" at the same time, cause I've received
spam that got labeled by my filters. I don't know about
auto-forwarding though.

[Jesse Hathaway]

Yes, I am an odd duck, aren't I?

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.

Thanks for all your help!

--Jesse Hathaway

[bria...@gmail.com]

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.

[Stu]

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...@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

[the_general]

hi,

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

have fun,
wal

[Raven7]

Wal - Will this work for Win XP or is it intended for Linux?

Thanks, Don

[Ryan Morehart]

I would guess that it would work for Windows XP as well, assuming that
libgmail is cross platform.

Ryan

[Randy T.]

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 "user...@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. :)