This is to be a hands on meeting. The idea is for everyone who can to bring along a printer or a least a printout from their home printer so that we can compare the quality of printouts mainly for photographic images. We could also consider the speed and costs of running each printer where these are known. We may be able to set up a network for this meeting or alternatively transfer image files between machines via compact flash, SD or other cards or flash drive.
It has been suggested that a scanner could also be useful for this meeting so I could bring mine. Perhaps you would like some thing scanned and printed.
It could make quite an interesting evening.
We are also considering the purchase of a somewhat larger projection screen with a wide screen format, say 16:9, rather than square. If anyone knows of a cheap source for these it would be useful. we may try out different screens at this meeting if they are avaliable.
A full report of the AGM will be prepared for the next AGM.
Salient points for the club are that all the officers have been re-elected. We still do not have a permanent Secretary so Peter will continue as Acting Secretary.
The meeting voted to increase subscriptions to £20 per annum and visiting fees to £2.50 per meeting consequent on our rental charges increasing.
Please note that subscriptions are now due for 2007/8.
The formal business of the evening was followed by a talk and demo on Antispam software given by Frank. It is a great shame that more people were not able to attend the meeting since this was an excellent talk.
Spam named after inedible ham available after the war is one of the curses of the internet, it is very wasteful of time and resources.
Some years ago !Spamstamp became available as freeware which identified Spam and helped the user to filter and remove it later in Windows or Pluto. However this did nothing directly to remove Spam. Later !Antispam was released for Risc OS by Freeserve which not only identified Spam but was able to delete it also. This is still supported and the latest version is freeware issued under the GNU GPL licence. and may be downloaded from links on the original author Dave Higton's website at http://www.apts04.dsl.pipex.com/
[Ed. There is a lot of useful info here on how to set everything up particularly Harrient Bazley's article. , support groups etc.]
The most up-to-date version is on www.aconet.org/tools. Dave Higton's work is now supported by Frank de Bruijn and includes some work of Jeremy Nicoll.
So what does it do?
Antispam is a series of scripts which contain sets of rules. To start, there is a white list of known signatures or UIDs which will always be accepted. The rules file flows in strict priority from top to bottom. Much email from Korea and South East Asia is invariably Spam and this can be blacklisted.
The basic operation of the program is to check each email header and follow through the rules until the email has either been identified as Spam and marked for deletion or else passes all rules and may then be downloaded to the client. Only the header needs to be downloaded and not the body or attachments of the email.
The marked emails are then deleted from the server. A reference is kept of deleted emails in the form of a header and they are said to be "headered", so that if an email is later found to be "not spam" the sender may be requested to resend it. In operation Frank said that he rarely had to do this once the system had been running for a few weeks and at the same time the amount of spam getting through was much diminished.
One of the great merits of the program is that the rules are custom built and may be modified and added to by the user to refine. It will work alongside Pluto or Popstar and Newshound. A full description and installation details are included in a StrongHelp file in the application.
Rules
The header data fields like "From:", "To:", "Reply to:", "Envelope:", etc. are used to define the rules. In particular "Content Type: " is particularly useful to search for "multipart/alternative" and "text/html" can be used to delete html defined email which is often spam (but not invariably Ed.) . ("Ask friends to use text only" Frank advised.)
Rules can be set to Accept, Delete, Defer, Header or Divert. Defer means to leave mail on the server. Accept will download emails if you have set it to Download but otherwise it is like Defer and remains on the server. Divert is like Accept but will divert to a specified file and report an error if the file is not specified.
There is a common syntax for the rules which contain four elements
Action, keyword, operator and criterion.
e.g.
Delete Subject: = Business Opportunity*
the * replaces unknown parts of the string as in Backus Nor notation.
The use of the rules can be tried out with a new rule with the "Trial" option to ensure that it identifies spam correctly and not an email which is wanted.
Various status screens show what is going on and retrieve statistics on the number of emails in the various categories found.
Thank you Frank for completing our AGM evening with this very well presented and quite detailed demo; I hope I have done it justice with my report.
I shall have to try it out myself as I get hundreds of spam a day. It has to be tailored to one's own email sources but should hopefully cut out quite a lot of Spam without losing any genuine emails.
Shortly after the last meeting we heard that Gareth's father had been taken seriously ill with a heart attack and cardiac arrest. I am glad to report that he has made good progress since then. We wish him well and trust he will make a speedy recovery.
The Committee have held a meeting to define the future programme as shown below.
Please note that the May 2nd meeting publicised earlier with a visiting speaker has been changed.
| 2007 | ||
| May 2nd | Printing Comparisons evening | All |
| June 6th | The History of Royalty in England for 1000 years- A slideshow. | Tony |
| July 4th | Virtualisation - running multiple platforms on one machine. | Gareth |
| August TBA | Social evening. | All |
| September 5th | Outside speaker | TBA |
| October 3rd | JPEG Slideshow presentations | All |
| November 7th | What is a server? - (Microsoft based) | Michael |
| December 5th | Gadgets and party evening | All |
So far we have only one evening planned with a visiting speaker but this may change.
Talks with Visiting speakers are shown in Red. We will give more details as soon as they are confirmed.
Our meetings are held at the Bourne Vale Social Club, Halifax Road, Ipswich IP2 8RE , for a map and other details please see the website. http://icenicomputerclub.users.btopenworld.com
The first visit is free and subsequent visits for non - members is £2. The membership fee is £18 due from the AGM date in April, but may be reduced for those joining late in the year.
Continuing our publicity for EAUG events - please see their Website for details of their next meeting.
| 8th May 2007 | "AGM" + "Directional Aerials for WiFi" |
| 13th June 2007 | "Optical Character Recognition" |
| 10th July 2007 | "Voice Recognition" |
| TBA | "BBQ" |
| 11th September 2007 | "Voice over Internet Protocol" |
Meetings are at the Great Baddow Village Hall, on the second Tuesday of the month
opening at 7:30 p.m. for a start at 7:45 - 8:00 p.m.
For directions see below (note the new web addresses)
http://www.eaug.org.uk or 'phone one of the contacts on http://www.eaug.org.uk/ppl.htm
"ICENI does not have any Insurance cover for computers or other equipment so please be advised that you bring machines to the club at your own risk."
P.S. My insurance company have added my computer cover away from home with no extra premium required, yours might do the same.(Ed.)
If anyone would like a copy of the CD of our old newsletters this could be arranged.
I am open to suggestions on what people would like to have included in the website.
Our website URL is
http://icenicomputerclub.users.btopenworld.com as a virtual domain,
it can also be reached using http://www.btinternet.com/~icenicomputerclub
Email to: iceni@woolridge.org.uk