ANN: Fetchem image newsgroup filter first release

Edward C. Jones edcjones at erols.com
Mon Nov 6 17:45:38 EST 2000


The first public version of Fetchem has been released. It can be
found at "http://sourceforge.net/projects/fetchem/". Fetchem is a
download/filter/decode program for image newsgroups written
entirely in Python. It uses a variety of algorithms to filter
spam out of image newsgroups.

There is currently so much spam in these newsgroups that it has
become very difficult to read them. Good spam filters require a
fully powered programming language. Some of the spam can be
removed by regex searches of the news article headers. But
removing other spam, including the notorious high volume
PH.E'R-OM,O^NE spam, requires the power of a complete programming
language. Since Python (http://www.python.org) is easy to read
and write, it is used in Fetchem.

FEATURES

Some of the features of Fetchem (terrible name) are:

1. Powerful filtering capabilities that the user can reprogram.
(See match.py.)

2. Prepares HTML for your browser. "html.py" contains (yet
another) HTML writing program. It uses Python's keyword arguments
to pass in the attributes for each tag. For example,
FONT('stuff', Color='ff0000') returns the string

   <FONT COLOR="ff0000">stuff</A>

3. The header data is kept in a robust MySQL database.

4. Downloads news article headers and bodies. Uses the uudeview
library to    decode the images.

5. Interfaces with your browser using a proxy server written
using medusa.

REQUIREMENTS

A Linux system with Python 2.0 installed. MySQL, MySQLdb, medusa,
and uudeview should be present.







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