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”.

Download and install a SSL proxy

First, you need to install a proxy that will be a between the mail server and client that decrypts the SSL stream locally on your computer and passes it on to your client – a bit like an intermediate translator. Since the proxy is installed locally on your computer it’s still secure.

After looking around for a bit I stumbled upon stunnel that seems to work well and is free. Download stunnel here.

You also need to download a SSL library called libssl32.dll and place it into your stunnel directory. (Note: Some people claim you need to put libssl32.dll into the windows system directory but I didn’t have to.)

Configure stunnel

In the stunnel directory there should be a file called stunnel.conf (if not you can create it) – fill it with the rows below (all that is needed):

client = yes
debug = debug

[pop3s_gmail]
accept = 127.0.0.1:11010
connect = pop3.gmail.com:995

This basically means that stunnel will accept connections locally (127.0.0.1) at port 11010 and relay it to pop3.gmail.com at port 995.

Outlook => stunnel => gmail => stunnel => Outlook

Start tunnel

Start with the -install argument, from the command line (start->run->cmd) it looks like:
c:\program files\stunnel>stunnel.exe -install

Configure your email client to go via stunnel

In your email client (e.g. Outlook) open your SSL account settings and change the POP3 server to ‘localhost’ and port to 11010 (so it connects locally to stunnel at port 11010). Here is how it’s configured in Windows Mail:

I hope you can get it working. I had some trouble getting stunnel to run and I am not sure what I did wrong in the beginning. Please comment if you have any question or complementary information.

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)

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.

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.

- 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

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.

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.