BlackMamba - Open source semi-automatic Spam filter and eMail Previewer.

Spam! Bloody Spam! My mailbox is full of it. My dad gets more Spam in 1 day than all the (Ham) real eMails he gets in 1 week put together. I know that there are several Spam filters available, but they are either too complicated to use or too expensive. But the filters are getting better and better, for example Netscape 7+ comes with a very good built-in Spam filter. Unfortunately, so are the Spammers. They are resorting to shameless and desperate tactics. It started with direct Spam words in the Subject, then, as our Spam filters started filtering such mails, they started inserting punctuations and odd looking symbols in-between the Spam words to evade the filters. As the filters learnt to counter these, I was surprised to see how resilient and innovative the Spammers were becoming. The unnecessary punctuations were gone now. It was diacritics in place of the vowels! That was when I felt that this game was never going to end.

The challenge seemed too tempting to resist. I had to do something about it. Something simple and easy to use and understand, for people like my mom and dad :-). BlackMamba is a simple tool to preview eMail headers, sort them according to a few rules and delete the Spam. Then, open the undeleted (Ham) mails using your regular eMail client like Outlook or Netscape. To my pleasant surprise, it works surprisingly well. The old adage KISS (Keep It Simple and Stupid) couldn't be more true, I felt. I had originally started work on BlackMamba as an excuse to improve my OO Designing and programming skills. For those who don't seem too thrilled about a semi-automatic Spam filter, the architecture of BlackMamba might will be an interesting read over coffee/lunch.

My article on developing a Desktop application in Java using BlackMamba as a case study has been published in O'Reilly OnJava.com

• BlackMamba: A Swing Case Study

BlackMamba 1.1 has been released with a facility to set the UI Theme using the "ui" option at the commandline. Ex java -Dui=com.incors.plaf.alloy.AlloyLookAndFeel
-Dalloy.licenseCode=... -Dalloy.theme=glass
-cp %CLASSPATH%;BlackMamba_1.1.jar;lib/alloy.jar... blackmamba.ui.control.Start.

Screen shots: Click thumbnails for details.

Instructions:

• Installation and Running
• Usage
• Configuration
• Un-Installation
• Tips, Tricks and Frequently asked questions

Download BlackMamba 1.1 Windows Setup (617 KB): BlackMamba_v1.1_Installer.exe.

Download BlackMamba 1.1 binary (544 KB): BlackMamba_v1.1.zip.

Download BlackMamba 1.1 source code (501 KB): BlackMamba_v1.1src.zip.

I developed BlackMamba using Sun ONE Studio 4 CE (for designing the Swing UI) and Eclipse 2.1.1 on my Windows box running Windows 2000 Professional - 256 Megs RAM, Celeron 800 MHz and Sun JDK1.4.

Many thanks to

• Jörg Pleumann, for developing Mail4Me, which is an excellent light-weight alternative to the Java Mail library.
• Taoufik Romdhane, for developing Metouia Look and Feel, which is being used for OSes other than Windows and Mac.
• Eric Albert, for developing BrowserLauncher and others who've updated it.
• Atlassian's Seraph whose com.atlassian.seraph.util.CookieUtils.java has been modified to store and encrypt passwords.
• Nullsoft's Scriptable Install System team for developing the NSIS installer, which I've used to make the Windows installer.