IMAP Spam Begone (ISBG) version 2.1.0 is out!

2018-06-14 - Louis-Philippe Véronneau

When I first started at the non-profit where I work, one of the problems people had was rampant spam on their email boxes. The email addresses we use are pretty old (+10 years) and over time they have been added to all the possible spam lists there are.

That would not be a real problem if our email hosting company did not have very bad spam filters. They are a worker's coop and charge us next to nothing for hosting our emails, but sadly they lack the resources to run a real bayesian-based spam filtering solution like SpamAssassin. "Luckily" for us, it seems that a lot of ISPs and email hosting enterprises also tend to have pretty bad spam filtering on the email boxes they provide and there were a few programs out there to fix this.

One of the solutions I found to alleviate this problem was to use IMAP Spam Begone (ISBG), a script that makes it easy to scan an IMAP inbox for spam using your own SpamAssassin server and get your spam moved around via IMAP. Since then, I've been maintaining the upstream project.

At the time, ISBG was somewhat abandoned and was mostly a script made of old python2 code. No classes, no functions, just a long script that ran from top to bottom.

Well, I'm happy to say that ISBG now has a new major release! Version 2.1.0 is out and replaces the last main release, 1.0.0. From a script, ISBG has now evolved into a full-fledged python module using classes and functions. Although the code still works with python2, everything is now python3 compliant as well. We even started using CI tests recently!

That, and you know, tons of bugs were fixed. I'd like to thank all the folks who submitted patches, as very few of the actual code was written by me.

If you want to give ISBG a try, you can find the documentation here. Here's also a nice terminal capture I made of ISBG working in verbose mode:


codeisbgemail