Licence: Freeware

Download security software: SpamPal 1.72v Beta

Developer: SpamPal

Because not everyone who uses a machine on a DNSBL list will be a spammer, SpamPal has a powerful whitelisting feature that allows you to ignore DNSBL listings for certain senders or for parts of the Internet.

What's new:

• Mostly a bug-fix release - and again my sincerest thanks to everyone who's been helping to test it.
• User Interface:
  • Fixed crash when cancelling "choose port settings" when running as Windows service
  • Tray icon action wasn't been set for fresh installs; fixed.
  • Tried to stop port properties dialog from "blinking" when opened.
  • Some old-style status window configuration files weren't being parsed correctly; fixed.
  • Added more protection to prevent configuration window crashing after it's closed.
  • The "Application or service?" dialog you sometimes see just after install could cause all kinds of weirdness if the installer had rebooted your machine - fixed.
• Mail filtering:
  • Now removes any pre-existing (and possibly forged) X-SpamPal: header lines.
• POP3:
  • Fixed crash in prefetching
  • Now supports CAPA (ie "Capabilities") command.
  • Fixed unlikely buffer overflow when processing malformed LIST response.
• IMAP4:
  • Fixed crash in prefetching
  • Fixe crash when parsing a malformed FETCH response.
  • Fiddled with removal of \Seen flags from moved spam messages.
• SMTP:
  • When adding SMTP connection settings for transparent proxy, "Add Received header:" option was activated and could not be deactivated. Fixed.
  • Uninitialised string could occaisionally cause problems when rejecting an incoming message for an unusual reason; fixed.
• Public blacklists/DNSBLs:
  • Fixed buffer overflow that was causing crashes.
  • Where supported, now uses Microsoft's DNSAPI.DLL for DNS queries; no longer supports getaddrinfo method.
  • Hostname lookups (ie from the UrlBody plugin) weren't appearing in Verbose-level logfile when they were fetched from the cache; fixed.
  • No longer does hostname lookups for w3.org and several other frequently-used domains (you can replace this default list of domains to ignore by creating a file ilist_hostname.dat in SpamPal's configuration folder - for the file format see the default_ilist_hostname.dat file that ships with SpamPal)
  • Fixed issue where multiple public blacklist entries were querying the same underlying resource; previously only the first such blacklist you had selected would actually get queried. (This became an issue because the recent updated list of public blacklists uses zz.countries.dk zone for most country lookups.)
• Transparent Proxy:
  • No longer corrupts system error number if crash-trapping turned on; fixes problem with VMWare NAT service.
  • Could crash when unloading transparent proxy DLL while LSP logging feature is activated; fixed.
  • Transparent proxy should now fire async events for filtered connections correctly.
  • Was occaisionally failing to signal FD_READ events after several WSAEventSelect calls - fixed. Should fix further problems with VMWare NAT proxy.
  • Could occaisionally get into a pointless loop of read-notifications on filtered sockets; fixed.
  • Implemented work-around for "interesting" design of Etrust Antivirus.
  • Implemented protection against socket objects being deallocated in one thread whilst still active in another - should fix lots of crashes.
  • Was occaisionally losing the last few bytes of a mail session (generally the 'QUIT' command) - fixed.
  • Should now be a little quicker to establish new SpamPal-filtered mail sessions.
• Misc:
  • Uninstaller program could try to re-init Winsock2 and crash; fixed.
  • Update-checking now integrated into spampal.exe rather than a separate updates.dll (which can be deleted).
  • Update-checking now uses latest zlib1.dll and not old zlib.dll, which some anti-spyware packages bizarrely continue to complain about.
  • Windows Service version should no longer create events will illegal names on Windows NT
  • No longer performs housekeeping (update-checking and other sundry jobs) if there are any mail sessions active.
  • Now writes to logfile when system is detected entering & leaving standby mode. Tried to eliminate WSAENOTSOCK errors some people see when their machine comes out of standby mode or hibernation.
  • Upgrading configuration from pre-v1.63 had become broken at some point; fixed.
  • No longer supports importing configurations from pre-v0.05 - I'm sure nobody is still using such an ancient beta-version anyway!
  • Low-level I/O code rewritten; now more flexible for me and shouldn't be any difference from a user's point of view.
  • Now uses an ultra-safe snprintf function as I'm not 100% sure the standard Windows one doesn't cause buffer overflows.
• Crash reporting:
  • Crash reports now include more detail
  • Service now sleeps briefly after a crash - should fix problem of GUI being killed before crash dialog could appear.
  • Fixed bug that was preventing transparent proxy crashes from being reported.
  • Single crashes should no longer cause multiple crash dialogs.
• Debugging versions:
  • When trimming LSP logfiles, no longer shows an error if C:\SpamPalDebug\lsp is empty.
• Source code:
  • SpamPal version number now set correctly when building with Microsoft Visual C++.