Pinta

What is Pinta?

Pinta is a free simple and flexible Mailenable antispam plugin. It was made to be fast, customizable and with extensive logging support.

Current public version is 1.75d. MD5 Hash of the zip file is 3AF1F8C64A1CDE202CFE8BB0772F3F53
Download Pinta here and get here the digital signature

Installing Pinta

You can place Pinta in any folder on your disk or network. Since it needs some support files, it's better if you place it in its own folder.

Then you need to set up base configuration. Start Pinta from the command line, you should get something like:

Pinta 1.75d (c) 2004 H&C works - http://www.gorlani.com/portal
This is FREE and unsopported software. Use it at your own risk

Mailenable installation directory: E:\Program Files\Mail Enable
Mailenable data directory: E:\Program Files\Mail Enable\Storage

A file named pinta.reg was created in this directory. Double click it to import
settings to the registry
These are the settings:

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\H&C Works\PintaMG]
"MeSMTPPath"="E:\\Program Files\\Mail Enable\\Storage\\Queues\\SMTP"
"SkipAttach"="1"
"Action"="Move"
"MoveDir"="z:\\bin\\pinta\\moved"
"Debug"="1"
"Compare"="Strict"
"LogFile"="z:\\bin\\pinta\\pintalog.txt"
"CaseSensitive"="0"
"BadWordsInHeaders"="0"
"Beep"="0"
"Compare"="Strict"
"Punctuation"="',.:;?!\\/|\""
"SMTPOnly"="1"
"SafeLog"="1"
"LogType"="Registry"
"WordsFile"="z:\\bin\\pinta\\pintawords.txt"
"Weighted"="0"
"WeightLimit"="100"
"FromOkFile"="z:\\bin\\pinta\\pintafromok.txt"
"FromBlackList"="z:\\bin\\pinta\\pintablack.txt"
"ReceivedBlackList"="z:\\bin\\pinta\\pintarecblack.txt"

Action must be Delete or Move or Copy or None
LogType must be File or Registry or Both
Debug must be 0 (no log), 1 (normal), 2 (complete)
Compare must be Strict or Loose

A file named pinta.reg is created containing the settings above. Double click on it to import the settings into the registry.

If you read "Cannot find a valid Mailenable installation here" Pinta is not able to locate a local installation of Mailenable. You can use pinta on a separate machine, if you provide correct file paths replacing <replace me with Mailenable Storage path>.

Then jump to Mailenable management console, expand Servers->Localhost->Agents, right-click on MTA and select properties. Check Enable pickup event and point to pinta.exe.
Stop and start MTA to begin filtering.

Files needed by Pinta

Pinta really need only to files: the binary pinta.exe and pintawords.txt that is the file that contains, one per line, the words or phrases you want to ban. See configuration for details.
Other file may be used to expand filtering capabilities:

pintafromok.txt	this is a from whitelist. Each line is a substring search rule, so you can type safe@safer.domain or just @safer.domain
pintablack.txt	Like the preceding, but this is a blacklist
pintarecblack.txt	This contains lines that are checked against Received: headers. This lets you filter out mail that passed from specific servers or programs or IPs.

If you don't want to use these file, delete them instead of creating them empty for faster filtering.

Configuration

You need to edit registry values to change Pinta behaviour. Go to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\H&C Works\PintaMG. You need admin rights to edit values here.

Action	Must be: Delete: this deletes messages considered spam. No mail will be received Move: spam emails are moved to the MovePath directory (see below). No mail will be received Copy: spam is moved to MovePath and a copy will be delivered. Useful while analyzing spam without risks to delete emails None: the program does the entire mail processing but performs no action other tha logging
BadWordsInHeaders	Must be 0 or 1. This makes the filter engine work on the raw email, including headers. So if you insert the word "spam" into pintawords.txt, it will match any header, like the header name itself. It will catch: spamlevel: low or from: nospam@mydom.ain or Subject: spammer. Do not use it to filter from fields, use blacklist instead. You can use to filter message containign a special header, perhaps combined with the Copy action, i.e. BackupThisMail: yes custom header... Default is off (0), as it is faster
Beep	Must be 0 or 1 Beeps on each invocation. You can "hear" your server working and evaluate the "load" of the server :-)) Useful for debugging
CaseSensitive	Must be 0 or 1 Only performcase sensitive searches
Debug	Must be 0, 1 or 2 0 is no log, 1 is normal, 2 is complete. You should use 1 in production environments
FromBlackList	Path to the from blacklist file. This contains tha file name too, i.e. c:\pinta\myblacklist.txt
FromOkFile	Like the preceding, but this is the whitelist
LogFile	Complete path to the log file, i.e. c:\pinta\log.txt
LogType	Must be File, Registry or Both If registry is selected, you will see events from pinta in the application log. Category is the pid of the pinta process.
MeSMTPPath	Path to Mailenable Storage directory, i.e. c:\program files\mailenable\storage
MoveDir	Path to the directory that will contain spam messages from Copy or Move actions, i.e. c:\pinta\spambackup
SafeLog	Uses a "safer but slower" log method
SkipAttach	Must be 0 or 1 Skips processing mime encoded attachments. Faster.
SMTPOnly	Must be 0 or 1 Only process SMTP messages
WordsFile	The complete path to bad word file, i.e. c:\pinta\pintawords.txt
ReceivedBlackList	The complete path to banned elements in Received: headers, i.e. c:\pinta\pintarecblack.txt
Compare	Must be Loose or Strict Loose makes the program use a substring search algorithm, so if you include put into your WordsFile you will find a match with computer, or output Strict makes the program use an exact match comparison: put does not match with input. While parsing the string, characters from Punctuation (see below) are considered punctuation. You can still have a loose match prefixing particular words in your WordsFile with an asterisk (), so bug will match debug and buggy also in Strict mode. Be careful: if you prefix some words with the * and then set the Compare Mode to Loose, you will find matches only for lines that containt the words with the asterisk present: girl will not* match with "This is my girlfriend". This means that you probably need to separate WordsFiles for Loose and Strict Mode, if you use the * Also, if your WordsFile contains a phrase rather than a word (i.e. "this example"), the program will always perform a Loose match.
Punctuation	Tha characters that will be considered punctuation while parsing mail lines (See compare above)
Weighted	Must be 0 or 1 Turns on weighted processing.
WeightLimit	This is the maximum allowed weight for an email

That's it!

If you need to install it on several machines and have the same settings, you can "cluster" the configuration files in a single network position and set the path using UNC conventions. So you can put \\server\pinta\wordsfileloose.txt into the WordsFile configuration parameter.

Weighted Mode

When running in weighted mode, Pinta evaluates the "weight" for an email. If it is greater than WeightLimit parameter into the configuration, the mail is marked as spam.
When running into wheigthed mode, the words file must be in the format "word,weight", just like:

myword,50
anotherword,75
badword,101

with weight being an integer number.

Implementing Pinta

The fastest way to implement filtering with Pinta, is to set it to the None mode. Then you must decide if you need loose match or strict match and then if you're going to have weighted mode activated.
Then prepare the files, and set debug level 2. This way you can see the way Pinta filters messages, without taking specific actions. You can also use Copy mode, so you can evaluate filterede messages and the tune word weights, but be aware that you probably need a permission to read other people's email!
When you're done with the log and email analysis you can change to Move or Delete mode to start real filtering with debug level set to 1.

If you really want extreme performance (something like having more than 50 messages per second and per server) it is wise to consider using a ramdisk for the supporting and log files (although considering the limited size of support files, they should remain into the system cache).

This program is thought to be very simple to administer and install. This software come with no kind of implicit or explicity warranty, so use it at your own risk.
If you need help or infos, jump to the site forums and ask there.

Current public version is 1.75d. MD5 Hash of the zip file is 3AF1F8C64A1CDE202CFE8BB0772F3F53
Download Pinta here and get here the digital signature

Version history

1.75d (20040614)
+ Added None mode
+ Added Wheighted mode
= Fixed header filtering
= Several optimizations

1.51d (20040525)
+ Added Loose/Strict mode

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