Currently, the PY Spam Gobbler is supplied in the form of a ZIP file.

It can be copied anywhere in your file system. Here, it is shown on the LMDE Desktop:

If you click on it using the right mouse button, you will be shown various options:

As it says in the instructions, click on the name of the script.

Lo and behold, your Spam Gobbler is now up and running!

Choosing "Extract Here" will produce a Spam Gobbler folder as shown above.

The contents are shown on the right:

The red arrow points to the first file in the folder, which is the BobbyPY script runner. Double-clicking on it will display all the Python scripts in the folder, which in this case is the single script "spam_gobbler.py".

If you need help at any time, just click on the question-mark icon in the top right-hand corner.

This very HELP page will then be displayed in a browser window.

The PY Spam Gobbler allows you to preview, on the server, the "From" and "Subject" content of the e-mails residing on up to 20 separate accounts. For each account, you can decide which e-mails you would like to keep and which ones you wish to delete, thus avoiding the subsequent download of spam into your main e-mail app (e.g. Thunderbird).

To facilitate this, optionally, you can include the names of senders on a universal "Keep List" so that on the next preview they are no longer marked for deletion. But of course, this general Keep List is editable, and removing a sender from it will cause it to be marked for deletion once more. On the other hand, you can easily decide to delete an e-mail on a particular occasion, but still maintain it on the Keep List, so that its deletion is not automatically suggested in following previews.

Details of all this are given below.

Begin by clicking on the "Setup..." button at the top:

You are now ready to preview the e-mails at your first website.

Click on the little inverted triangle on the right of the red accounts menu at the top, and select your account:

Then fill in (or "out" if you are American) the details of your e-mail accounts, substituting the first "dummy" line.

Please note that in order to maintain the relational integrity of the 3 separate columns in the dialogue (dialog), you will be unable to copy or paste your data, and the ENTER key on your keyboard will be ineffective. Just click on the line in a column you wish to edit, and type in your info.

When you have finished, click on the OK button.

After choosing the account, click on "Preview Mail". As shown, you need to wait for the e-mails to be downloaded. The waiting time depends on various factors, such as the number of e-mails needing to be downloaded, conditions of the Internet, etc.

All being well, your preview of e-mails for the account will be shown:

(You will be informed if there are no e-mails to download.)

As you can see, initially, ALL e-mails are marked for deletion.

After review, you may wish to keep some of them.

The "delete" words on the left can be toggled, so if you click on the word "delete", it will change to the word "KEEP". And if you change your mind, clicking on the word "KEEP" will change it back to "delete" again.

The following images show REAL websites (bobbypy "brother" websites), since the exampĺes shown above are dummies of course.

Previewing footnote: On rare occasions, for reasons which are unclear, your e-mail will fail to download. You know this because you are left waiting for an unusually long time. When this happens, try clicking on the "Preview" icon again. If it still doesn't work, check that your Internet is functioning OK. If it is, then re-start the Gobbler app. Instead of closing the program and using the Script Runner again, a lazy way of doing this is simply to choose the current account once more, using the little inverted triangle by the side of the red accounts box. You will note that the display flashes. That's because the app is being re-started. Another easy way of re-starting the app is to click on the "Keep..." icon, and then CANCEL the dialogue which appears.

After previewing, when you are satisfied with your choices of e-mails to either keep or delete, click on the "Delete Spam" icon. The e-mails you have chosen for deletion will be removed from the server, and a following "Preview" will occur automatically.

After clicking on the OK button of the alert shown above, the display will disappear for some time. Don't be alarmed! It's not a program crash. The app has been re-started, and it is downloading e-mails from your current account again. When the download is complete, the display will appear as shown below:

QUESTION: What if I want to keep ALL the e-mail senders shown in the Preview, and I don't want to delete any at all? How should THOSE senders be entered onto the universal Keep List?

No problem. With the e-mails all marked as "KEEP" on the left of the display, click on "Delete Spam" as usual. The app will go to the server and delete nothing at all, but it WILL put the senders you wish to keep onto the Keep List afterwards. Simple!

The Keep List (see image above) is desribed as "universal" because it applies to ALL your e-mail accounts, and not just to the one you are currently using.

The explanation so far has informed you of how e-mail senders can be put ON to this List, so that the e-mails you download are kept on the server rather than being deleted from it. But what about if you change your mind about the e-mails you want to permanently keep when previewing? In other words, how can you take senders OFF the list?

This is exactly the purpose of the Keep List Editor.

Like the Preview list, the words on the left can be toggled. So if you click on "KEEP", it will change to "delete", and vice versa.

Once you have decided which items to remove from the list, just click on the "Save & Exit" button. From now onwards, the senders you have removed from this list will be marked with the suggested "delete" in the e-mail Preview.

If a sender's name is on the Keep List, it will always be suggested as "KEEP" when you do a Preview of your mail. However, on a particular occasion, you might want to delete the e-mail. Just toggle it to "delete" when previewing, and execute "Delete Spam" as usual. However, the fact that this sender has not been edited off the general Keep List means that on the following preview, "KEEP" will be suggested once more for this sender.

If you compare this display with the previous one, you will see that the spam really has been removed from the server.

Furthermore, the senders of all the e-mails you decided to KEEP will now have been entered onto the universal Keep List, so the next time you do a preview, they will be marked for KEEPing rather than deleting.

Remember then, that when you mark e-mail senders with "KEEP", and do a "Delete Spam", this is the ONLY way that those senders can be entered onto the Keep List. You cannot edit this list manually to add senders' names.

To see this Keep List, click on the "Keep..." icon, top left:

IMPORTANT NOTE

if you normally use the IMAP protocol to manage your e-mails, it works like this: You can download COPIES of the e-mails kept on the server, and you can do what you like with them, but the original e-mails stay on the server so that they continue to be available to other devices/users. Removing emails from the server is not normally automatic, and your particular setup might require an administrator to do it when required.

Common usage of the POP3 protocol is often a bit different. E-mail apps (e.g. Thunderbird) use it to download e-mails to a chosen machine, and then delete those e-mails from the server automatically. This means that the original e-mails are no longer available to other devices/users, and for this reason, the IMAP protocol is frequently preferred by users.

However, contrary to common belief and practice, usage of the POP3 protocol in no way obliges e-mails to be deleted from the server automatically! You can download copies of your e-mails to your machine, and the originals stay on the server, just as with IMAP. However, if you decide to delete the original e-mails from the server (so that they are no longer available to other devices/users), you can do that too, very quickly and easily.

You might not be aware of it, but if you look in your settings in Thunderbird for example, you will see that the automatic deletion of e-mails under POP3 really is optional, so there is nothing special about what we are doing here in the PY Spam Gobbler.

And as you can see, you just need to click on the option in order to prevent your e-mails from being deleted automatically on the server.

Currently, the PY Spam Gobbler works with "normal" e-mail accounts associated with a website, and not with accounts such as GMail etc., which rely on IMAP access exclusively for reasons of security. It uses the POP3 protocol to download copies of e-mails from the server, and presents you with the "From:" and "Subject:" content of them, which is normally more than sufficient for you to decide whether they constitute "spam" . Then, in a separate process, you can delete this spam from the central server, remembering that if you do so, those same e-mails will no longer be available to other devices/users using the same account.

"Are we CLEAR? !!!" [That's Jack Nicholson speaking, not me!]

At the moment, you require a screensize of at least 1920x1080 pixels. This is the most common screen size in use nowadays, which makes the Spam Gobbler available to the majority of people. If you are not among those people, then please accept my apologies. Later on, if I have the opportunity, I will provide a Spam Gobbler which adapts to smaller screens.

It was written in Python, which means that you need to have Python3 installed on your computer. If you are using Linux Mint in some form (recommended), you don't have to do anything: Python3 is pre-installed, and it is ready to run "out of the box". However, on some other Debian-compatible distros, you might not be so lucky. Even if you are using Debian itself, you might find that, unfortunately, you have work to do in order to get Python3 up-and-running. So stick with Mint if you can.

This first version of the PY Spam Gobbler requires a Debian-compatible platform ("distro") and a minimum screen size of 1920 x 1080 pixels.

I did my very best to make the Gobbler work with Python to download and delete e-mails as required, but to no avail. I came up against some fatal flaws which made it impossible. (See the amazing number of builds it took before success was achieved.) The only practical solution I found was to use an old 32-bit Rebol module I wrote many years ago for Windows. As a consequnce, the user needs to have WINE installed for it to run. Most users will have it installed already. If you are a newcomer to Linux, this might not be the case, so if you are in doubt about how to install it, look HERE for an example of how easy it is to install in Linux Mint.

If you normally use the IMAP protocol (with an e-mail app such as Thunderbird), what normally goes in the "Server" column is something like "imap.mysite.com". Here, even though the Spam Gobbler uses the POP3 protocol, where you would normally need to enter e.g. "mail", "pop3" or just "pop" etc., you really do need to enter your Server specification in the form "imap.mysite.com" as usual.

[Please read the important note given at the beginning of this HELP.]