Sporkie

From Syncleus Wiki

Sporkie Says "No More Spam!"

The Sporkie project is a new challenge/response spam e-mail filter. It uses CAPTCHA's (randomly generated distorted images of numbers) in order to verify a person that is sending e-mail is real flesh and blood. It works in the same manner as the ASK project and similar challenge/response filters, except that Sporkie uses CAPTCHA's. In future versions of Sporkie we will provide the user the option to disable CAPTCHA's when desired. The main advantage to using CAPTCHA's is that it prevents automated spam bots that use real e-mail addresses to get removed before you see them. With ASK and other challenge/response filters these bots get through the system. But with Sporkie you can rest easy knowing every e-mail you get came from a real person, and there isn't even a spam folder to worry about. No more miss filed spam as I'm sure we are all familiar with.

This software works by sending a verification e-mail with a link back to anyone who sends you an e-mail. The user must then follow the link and enter the numbers they see in an image. If they input the correct numbers their e-mail gets put on a white list. All past (e-mail sent within the past 90 days) and future e-mails from that user will go directly to your account. It will completely eliminate all spam since it verifies that the e-mail address the mail was sent from was the real address, and that a human person uses that e-mail address. Other systems simply verify the address is a real e-mail address.

Sporkie is written completely in Java. It requires Java 5.0 or higher, however very minimal portions of code use 1.5 specific idioms. It would not be hard to write a Java 1.4 port.

The version currently in the SVN is rewritten in ruby. It is fairly stable and just about ready to be published as a stable release. It is similar to the version provided on this site except the CAPTCHA is actually sent as part of the e-mail. This means there is no longer a need for a web server.

Sporkie is provided under the OSCL Type-C license.

Sporkie is currently in an alpha stage so there is no stable release as of yet.

If you need any help installing, compiling, or patching this software in any way at all please feel free to contact us. We cant promise support, but we do encourage you to try. We will do our best to offer our help.

Resources

Latest Unstable:
0.1 Alpha Release Canidate 1 - Binaries
0.1 Alpha Release Canidate 1 - Source

Public SVN:
svn://svn.syncleus.com/sporkie

Bug Reporting & Development Status:
TRAC reporting
Hudson Continuous Integration reporting