If you use an instant messenger, then maybe you’ve run into the problem of getting those annoying spam messages from people you don’t know. I am probably one of the lucky ones that has never had any trouble with instant messenger spam, but I am still going to try to prevent it from ever happening. If you use Pidgin, then Bot-Sentry is a great plugin to install. If you don’t use Pidgin, then you should try it out. It’s an instant messaging program that can connect to multiple IM accounts from multiple IM services.

What Bot-Sentry does is it only allows people to send you a message if they are on your allowed list, or on your friends list. If somebody tries to contact you that isn’t on either of those lists, then they will be given a question that they need to answer before they can contact you. This message is supposed to be something easy enough for anybody to answer. It is just there to stop the automatic spam bots from giving you those annoying messages.

I had a little trouble installing this plugin in Ubuntu, but I found a great post on the Ubuntu Forums that explains what to do. First you need to install a few things:

sudo aptitude install build-essential pidgin-dev checkinstall

Then you need to compile it:

./configure
make
sudo checkinstall

After that, it still didn’t work for me, but somebody at the bottom of the page suggested to copy the files to the purple-2 directory, which worked for me:

sudo cp /usr/local/lib/bot-sentry.* /usr/lib/purple-2/.

Now I shouldn’t have any trouble with spam in the future.  Got any other tips on controlling IM Spam?