LibAntispam dates back to 1998. In that year, a dispute started between myself and a colleague who was jealous about the work that I did as a network administrator. He was also jealous about the internet security projects that I was developing at the time.

   In 2001, this colleague sent my e-mail address to several spammer lists in the internet. As a consequence, I started to receive an ever increasing amount of spam in my mailbox.

   In 2002, I was developing web tools for the DNSBL site of the Antispam-UFRJ project. At that time, I first realized that it would be important to write C language functions to verify that internet domain addresses were authentic. These functions should verify whether IP ranges were valid or not, and they should also query DNSBL sites. I gave the name LibAntispam to this set of functions. However, since most of the functions were very simple, I did not plan to disclose them.

   Simultaneously, I was still troubled by the exceedingly large amount of spam that my mailbox had been accumulating since 2001. By that time, I had already gathered much experience by carefully inspecting the spam headers, and I had become used to many of the techniques used by spammers.

   Among Sendmail-8.11.6 functionalities, I tried to find some special feature that would make it possible for me to apply antispam rules to counter the spammer techniques. Unfortunately, I did not find any such feature in Sendmail. I did not find it in any other Mail Transport Agent (MTA) either.

   Since cancelling my e-mail address was impossible at that time, I decided to write C code for all the functionalities that I deemed important for Sendmail to have. I started to add these functionalities to LibAntispam.

   As time went by, encouraged by good initial results, I improved LibAntispam constantly. For this improvement, I also counted on valuable suggestions and remarks made by my friend João Carlos Mendes Luiz (Jonny). I also took the improvement opportunity to develop a web interface. This interface allows users of my network to control LibAntispam functionalities relating to their own e-mail addresses, in a simple and fast manner.

   Today, I am proud to make the following three statements:

1. LibAntispam has made me free from much of the hassle I had undergone as I tried to block the spam.


2. Since I started to use LibAntispam, I never heard again a single complaint, from my users, about our network antispam rules.


3. I was able to find an elegant solution to my personal problem that was created by my colleague in 2001.