New Openfire plugin to help reduce spam!

The Openfire community is happy to announce the immediate availability of a new plugin: the blacklist spam plugin.

With the growing popularity of XMPP-based solutions, we’re also seeing an increase of a less desirable application of XMPP: the distribution of unsolicited messages over instant messaging (SPAM, or SPIM).

In order to help our Openfire community combat known spam, we have now released a new plugin the “Spam blacklist” plugin. This is configured with a URL that is used to lookup addresses of known SPAM distributors and block all messages sent by these addresses.

By default, the plugin is configured to read from a blacklist that is hosted on the igniterealtime.org website, and block all messages sent by any user on a domain listed there. The blacklist hosted by the Ignite Realtime community is a periodically updated copy of the list that is curated by the https://github.com/JabberSPAM/blacklist project. You can help combat spam by contributing to that project!

In the next few hours, the plugin will pop up in the list of available plugins on all Openfire instances. Alternatively, you can manually download and install the plugin from its archive page.

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We are using Openfire internally in a local LAN, do we need this plugin?

This plugin will block certain traffic that is sent over XMPP federation / server-to-server connections. If you do not have any of those, then this plugin is of little benefit to you at this stage. Future versions might include more functionality, but it stands to reason that if your Openfire domain is running in an isolated domain, you’ll not have SPAM issues.