Now I don't know about you, but one of my pet hates (apart from the Fugees, ties, gardening programmes, Amiga users, hovercraft and Pamela Anderson) is receiving junk mail through the post. It makes me even more annoyed when *you* actually have to pay to get it electronically, and not get the satisfaction that the idiots who send you crap through the post wasted 26p on somebody who habitually tears it up into little bits, ritually eats part of it and uses the rest to stuff pillows.
Therefore I wrote this petit program (or petite programme? Let's not be sexist) for my Argonet account (which, incidentally, I did get free with the Clan offer last Christmas but it took two months to arrive. cheers!), before I started to post in any great volume to Usenet. It changes your e-mail address, in a thwoggingly brilliantly complicated way that I don't fully understand when it gets saved out, to a false one, so any automatic spam machines send all of their codswallop into a black hole. (If you're feeling really vindictive, make it the address of somebody you don't like. :-)) Of course, I can't guarantee it will stop ALL spam, because so many auto-responders are artificially intelligent and if they detect a spam block they'll look in the signature, so I'll repeat the advice that Jonathon Dingle gave me, which is DON'T put your e-mail address in your sig but put the censored version & instructions how to uncensor it. It'll do for now but I'm sure some person with too much time on their hands will work out a spammer that gets around it...
How to Use
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Put this in your !Boot sequence so you don't forget to load it...
NB: if you know absolutely bugger all about Acorns, consult your friendly UserGuide/sysop/brick wall..
Unspam (sorry I couldn't think of a more original name! I was in a hurry!) is configurable - there are four textfiles within.
* ChangeFrom
This will contain your current e-mail address.
* ChangeTo
This will contain what you want Unspam to change it to.
EXTRAORDINARILY IMPORTANT NB: Because of the way the program works,
it does a straight search and replace and no moving about of the text,
the ChangeFrom and ChangeTo addresses *MUST* be the same length -
currently it's configured as ..
ChangeFrom - whoever@argonet.co.uk
ChangeTo - please@do.not.spam.me
If they're different lengths, silly things will happen!
It also looks for EVERYTHING that's in the file - including a Return
character you put after it. So don't put one in! I could have made
it so it took account of it, but as I said, I was in a hurry.
* !Help
This file, you dozy sod.
* MailPath
This is set up to be Apps.News.!NewsAgent.Outgoing. which works
for the Argonet Voyager suite. Basically, it's part of a pathname
that Unspam can search for before it decides that it's an e-mail
file being saved out, ie. the file being saved could be
adfs::0.$.Apps.News.!NewsAgent.Outgoing.46e245ae6, or