Pidgin Privacy Please

Pidgin Privacy Please is a Pidgin plugin that helps you stop spammers from annoying you.

You can have an auto-reply message sent to people whose messages have been blocked to prevent accidentally blocked messages from disappearing unnoticed. Messages from unknown peopleYou can block any messages from people who are not on your contact list and optionally have an auto-reply sent, telling them to request your authorization first. Just check the corresponding options in the configuration dialog.

Authorization requests For protocols where the user name does not tell you anything about the actual person behind it (eg. ICQ) there is also an option to have the user information pop-up automatically shown whenever somebody asks for your authorization. Or, if you already have all the friends you need, you can also have all authorization requests rejected automatically (note that, depending on the protocol, you might still be asked for a reason for rejecting).

To block spam-bots, you can have pidgin-privacy-please ask a simple question whenever somebody starts a conversation. If they send the right answer, they will be allowed to talk to you. Note that the right answer may be surrounded by other text, so if the right answer is "foo", and they write "i guess it's foo or bar" that's fine, so don't make the answer too short (eg. a simple character like 'a' is a bad choice). Also, be aware that using this feature might cause all kinds of strange and devastating side-effects if you already use another plugin with similar functionality such as Bot Sentry.