I get about 20-50 IM's from spam bots and random people I don't know (and I have no idea how they're getting my screen name) (mainly on Yahoo!), and it's really irritating to have to go through so many windows every time i get on my computer. I even get a lot of users/bots requesting that I authorize them to add me to their buddy list, without ever sending me a message (mostly ICQ).

I used to see a lot of the people I talked to had this weird plugin or something to their instant messaging app that seemed to block out spam bots. The idea seemed simple.

--

Bob sends Mary a message.

Mary's IM client automatically sends back a msg stating to type "this exact phrase" to prove Bob is not a bot.

Mary's client will suppress all messages from Bob until he types that phrase.

Once Bob types that phrase, Mary gets the original message, and all further messages from Bob.

--

Now I've not really seen this in action lately (the past 3 or 4 years), but I'm sure its still around. I'm wondering if Pidgin has a plugin or something that does just this...

Also a big plus would be to not get a request for someone to add me to their buddy list, until I've talked to them in chat first or add them to my list first, or something else - i dont know...

Thanks!

There was a perl script(addon) for Gaim flying the net which did that. If I remember correctly, it was called Gaim bot. I've tried to google for it, but did not find anything interesting. Since Gaim is now called pidgin, that addon might as well have chanced name. Try looking at their page.

If there is no addon for Pidgin or an inbuilt way to avoid spam bots, then probably most of their developers don't really care about it. Who knows, it could happen tomorrow or in 2099

I used to use a plugin for gaim called "ignorance". It had the ability to do some reasonably sophisticated whitelisting and blacklisting, according to regular expressions and so on.

I don't know if it still builds against pidgin - if you find out please post here, I would like to know.

There is Pidgin Bot Sentry @ https://sourceforge.net/projects/pidgin-bs/