I just did a small Privacy Mantra database update to include OpenOffice crash logs. I’ll probably look intro including Most Recent Used lists in the future.

First I want to say that I really like VLC player – it is by far the best player I’ve tried. If you are using Windows Media Player to watch movies – try VLC player and you will probably not want to use wmp any longer.

I’ve updated the Privacy Mantra database to clean the VLC cache. VLC stored a list of recent watched dvds in a directory called dvdcss, on Vista this list was located here: C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Roaming\dvdcss

By the way, I never understood if there was some meaning to the VLC player icon? A traffic cone? Am I just being slow or does it have a metaphorical meaning related to playing video or audio? But then again, the privacy mantra icon is not very easy to understand – but yes there is a link between it and “Privacy Mantra”.

I have had many requests to make Cactus Spam Filter run with clients that uses gmail. Gmail only allows SSL connections (Secure Socket Layer) and therefore Cactus Spam Filter has not been able to filter spam. This shows how you can circumvent this and make Cactus Spam Filter work with any SSL connection. Read the rest of this entry »

I have just released a new version of Cactus Spam Filter. I decided to keep it simple and just fix reported bugs and problems and not adding any new features.

Download Cactus Spam Filter 3.01 here.

New in version 3.01:
- Added Windows Live Mail to the be protected by the spam filter
- Problem when creating messages
- Problem when enumerating processes and low on system resources
- Outlook sometimes crashes when started
- dllassertions.txt growing very big and consuming disk space
- Corrupted xml config files
- Continuous removal of files in training area (so it doesn’t grow too big)

I’ve spent the day updating Command Line Pop Client fixing various bugs and adding some new features.

Command Line POP client connects to your POP3 account and download email and stores them into plain text directly on your hard drive.

Upon requests I have added a new feature that allows you to save mail attachments independently from the mail it was received in. It extracts the attachments (pictures, movies and all other attachments) and saves them to an attachment directory. This can be very useful for various data mining purposes.

I think I managed to fix the bug “An error occured when trying to parse a pop response. The response wasn’t +OK or -ERR.”. This could happen if mail servers returned +OK\n instead of +OK\r\n for RETR commands. Let me know if this now works.

I also removed the windows installer since it isn’t required, now it’s just a small zip file that you can download here.

Just wanted to let you know that I am currently going through the bug archive to fix for Cactus Spam Filter 3.01.

Bugs on the list:
- Problem when creating messages
- Problem when enumerating processes and low on system resources
- Outlook sometimes crashes when started
- dllassertions.txt growing very big and consuming disk space
- corrupted xml config files
- Problems running Cactus Spam Filter with malwarebytes

Some other things I may look at:
- Continuous removal of files in training area (so it doesn’t grow too big)
- Support for 64-bit mail clients

Thanks to everyone who has reported errors, I am sorry I haven’t had time to reply to you all.

Privacy Mantra 3.00 is out now, some new key features include

- Analysis of locations before they are removed
- 64-bit support
- Whitelist any entry – cookies, files, registry entries
- Automatic database updates
- Bunch of bug fixes
- Can be run from command line and hence time scheduled

I’ve just updated the database to clean Google Chrome. Let me know if you experience any problems.

I tried to fish donations by offering a Privacy Mantra Karma Edition that included some extra features (cookie manager and time schedule options) to anyone who donated. This did increase donations but the number of donations I get is so low they are not even covering the time it take to maintain two versions.

So I am happy to announce that I have decided to remove Privacy Mantra Karma Edition and include the features in the standard edition.

Here is a new screenshot of the analyze dialog:

As you can see I’ve added a ‘size’ column to reveal how much space each item takes.

I am currently installing Windows 7 x64 on WMWare to test compatability with Privacy Mantra – if everything runs smoothly the new version will probably be ready during the next weekend.

With the new version I am also encouraging users to share their own plugins, the sharing infrastructure is primitive but it grows popular I will create a proper structure.