Disclaimer
Program's installation
Configuration window
About proxy verification
About anonymity verification
Program's known limitations
Generated proxies lists

ProxyBag comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This program is free software, you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 (GPL) as published by the Free Software Foundation.

ProxyBag is written in Python and uses wxWidgets. Sorry about the package size, but several runtime libraries must be installed with program (they will be installed only in program's installation folder).

Install the program package in the folder of your choice, then run "ProxyBag" from the Windows Start menu.

Advanced users : All configuration information is in the "proxybag.cfg" file and can be tweaked if you respect the file format and letter case (A is not a).

ProxyBag does not read/write anything in Windows registry. Only some Windows system DLLs used indirectly by program/Python may do this, but it shoudn't happen. ProxyBag will survive to a Windows reinstallation if you install it in a safe folder.

The configuration window allow you to modify many parameters of the program.

Program :

- Connection timeout (in seconds) : specify how many time program will wait for connection to be established before to stop the attempt. This value is also used when receiving data from the server.
- Retries on proxy error : specify how much times program will try again to check the proxy on error. There should be at least 2 retries to keep proxies which have temporary too many connections.
- Max simulatneous threads : specify how many proxies will be checked at the same time, with more threads the whole verification will be faster. However, if your internet connection is slow or if you are already using another net application (ie. P2P), you should not use too many threads or proxies could be tagged as BAD just because your internet connection is too busy.
- Display grid lines in proxy list (restart needed) : display or hide lines between each proxy in the proxy list.

Basic :

- Resolve proxy hostname : specify if program must resolve IP address of the proxy and get its host name via the DNS. The host name can give interesting information about the proxy. This option may slow the verification but should be enabled.
- Find proxy country : specify if program must display the country for proxies. This option has no impact on verification time. Countries are however not known for some IP addresses or country information can be outdated.

Extended :

- Compare data sent by proxy with real content (with "Test page url" field) : some proxies are filtering web sites and don't return asked web pages. Most blocked web sites are porn, but also many others depending of proxy country. This option will make program to download the specified web page without proxy and then compare it to the one downloaded through the proxy. If the page is different, proxy will be tagged as "Filtered".
- Verify proxy anonymity with ProxyJudge : ProxyJudge is a script hosted on many web sites displaying your IP address and other information about the HTTP request sent by your browser. It's an easy way to know what used proxies are sending about you to visited web sites. Program will check if your IP address is given by proxy to visited web sites, if yes the proxy's anonymity will be "NO".
- Get your real IP address on program startup with ProxyJudge : specify if program must try to call the proxyjudge page without proxy to get your real IP address (not the one of your subnet if there is one). It's the best way to know if a proxy is anonymous or not. This option should be enabled even if it may slow down program startup.
- Evaluate proxy bandwidth (with "Bandwidth test url" field) : specify if program must evaluate proxy bandwidth by downloading the specified file. Finding a working proxy is one thing, it must be fast enough to be usable and this option will help you to check this by displaying bandwidth in KB. Note : specified file must be of an average size (more than 10k but less than 100k) to get a real evaluation and not slow down the verification process.

Proxy are tested in "real situation" with a test page which is generaly forbidden on most public proxies (default is PlayBoy's homepage). Program tries to connect to the proxy, asks for the test page, and then compare result to the content received without the proxy. If they are the same, program will try to find the hostname for the proxy (optionnal) and then will evaluate its anonymity (optionnal).

The proxy's anonymity is evaluated with a ProxyJudge script hosted on a public web page. If the provided ProxyJudge url doesn't work anymore, just find another url on any search engine and replace it in configuration.

At startup the program tries to determine your IP address. On success it will display it in statusbar or indicates an error. The anonymity check will be really reliable only if your IP address is known. You will see in proxy listing "YES" or "NO" in anonymity column.

If your IP address can not be determinated at startup, the anonymity check will only report the score given by the ProxyJudge script. Anonymity score is from 1 (best) to 5 (none), in fact 3 or less is acceptable. The evaluation of proxy anonymity relies on many criterias, but the essential thing is to check if your own private IP is published by the proxy to visited web sites. It should happen always with level 5 (such proxies should not be used), and may happen also often with level 4.

You must know however that even "anonymous" proxies generaly keep local private large logs with your ip and details about your transactions through them. Such logs can be used to track you down and get your real IP if there is a problem.

Some ProxyBag limits are known, they are not "bugs" :

- Proxies imported from text file NEED to be in the format [ipaddress]:[port] (ie : 11.22.33.44:80), trying to import hostnames (ie : anyfreeproxy.com) will crash program. Proxies with domain names are ignored when using "import from web" option.

- Do not use a too low time-out value (10 seconds should be a minimum), this can make working proxies to be marked as BAD because program will not wait enough for their responses.

- If you have checked hundred of proxies, program may start to slow down. You should then delete the proxy_list_bad.txt file in the program installation folder if it becomes too large (hundreds of KB), it will remove all proxies IP addresses that have been checked in the past and tagged as BAD.

Two text files will be generated automaticaly in the folder when exiting program : "proxy_list.txt" contains good or not checked yet proxies. "proxy_list_bad.txt" contains all bad proxies, this is your black list.

The list format is one entry [proxy ip address]:[port] (ie: 133.134.135.136:3128) one each line.

All imported proxies from the web or a text file will be compared to the content of these files for duplicates before to be finally added or ignored.

Just delete them to "start from scratch" with an empty list.