Spamato Revolutions - Mail Proxy for Spamato Spam Filter

In this thesis we present the Spamato Mail Proxy. Spamato is a collaborative spam filter system that acts as a stand alone component offering interfaces for mail clients and for spam filters. The Spamato Mail Proxy’s task is to allow for the connection of arbitrary mail clients to the spam filter system. Today’s email clients retrieve mails either through POP or IMAP. Therefore, the Spamato Mail Proxy supports both of these protocols as well as encrypted communication through SSL tunnels. The mail client connects to the Spamato Mail Proxy which transparently forwards the connection to the real mail server. Emails processed by the Spamato POP3 Proxy receive two new header lines which indicate the result of the filter process. Spam mails detected by the Spamato IMAP proxy are automatically moved to a dedicated spam folder. Since collaborative spam filter systems like Spamato depend on user feedback, an SMTP Feedback Proxy is also introduced that allows the user to provide feedback to the system by forwarding messages to the proxy. Again, ordinary messages are is transparently forwarded to an external SMTP server.