How to Block Spam With a Telnet Tool.

So why would I want to block spam?

Why would you want to keep it? Lets start by looking at different ways to block spam.

Block Spam at the Server.

Using this method you use a telnet program to log into your email server and view the emails, determine which one is junk and delete it. Sounds simple. It actually is, provided that you know how to use your telnet program. I use Putty but you could use the telnet program built in to your computer by running telnet.exe in a command window.

All you have to do is open the telnet program, type o mail.<your domain name> 110 like this

o mail.spam-killa.com 110 this is the instruction to open a port to access the mail server on spam-killa.com which is listening on port 110.

At that point there will probably be a response from the server similar to +OK Hello there. Now you type in user <your email user name> and press enter. Your email user name could be your ISP login name 'fred' or 'fred@spam-killa.com' or something similar.

Even if the user name is incorrect the mail server will almost certainly respond with +OK Password required.

Now type in pass <your email password> which could be anything, I have no idea what it would be for you but lets say it's 'password'.

Assuming that you got it correct, the mail server will respond with +OK Logged in else it will respond with -ERR.

Now it gets easy...

Typing in List will give you a list of the message number and the size of each message.

Type in Top <msg number> 10 will give you the headers and top 10 lines of the body of message number <msg number>, if that isn't enough information use Retr <msg number> and get the whole email.

If you decide that this one is spam type Dele <msg number> and it's gone (nearly). Actually it's just marked for deletion and won't be deleted until you type Quit and exit the server. If you just close your connection without typing Quit, then any emails marked for deletion are unmarked and remain on the server. If you Quit, the messages marked for deletion are gone forever.

That's the basics, if you want more information I suggest you do a search online for RFC 1939 which is the official standard for POP3 email servers.

Or you could go to www.spam-killa.com/spamkiller.php and use the easy to use spam deletion tool. You'll still need to know your email user name and password but you won't have to play with any settings, just decide which ones you want to keep and delete the rest.

brent (at) spam-killa.com

http://www.spam-killa.com