eMule: how to find the right files and avoid fakes and spam
If you encounter search results with very high availability (100 or even 400 or more users have these files) and all of them 100% complete, you can be sure these are spam files.
A way of getting more relevant results is using the search filters that are located at the right side of the search box. Use the Max/Min size filter to limit the filesize of the file you are looking for (since a single song can’t be more then 50MB and a full length movie can’t be less the 500MB).
Always check the length and bitrate with music and video files. Absense of these fields for mp3’s and avi’s is a good warning that the file might be fake. However if the number of complete sources is very few it might happen that this information has not been processed yet. It is a guess work but there is usually in the search results a file that appears less fake than the others.
When you download a file you usually have an approximate knowledge about the actual playing time. By looking for this in the search window you can guess that an mp3 of a single song that is e.g., 15 minutes is probably fake, as well as a movie that is 5 minutes long.
An mp3 file is normaly 128 kbit/s or greater and a divx (avi) is greater than 1000 kbit/s. If the file you are going to download is not, you can be quite sure it’s either fake or of extremely poor quality.
After you start downloading a file, go to the “Transfers” tab and wait for eMule to connect to available sources for the file you started downloading (takes from a few seconds to a couple of minutes usually); then right click on the file name and select “Comments…”. Click the “Search Kad” button at the bottom of the comments screen and wait for a few seconds. If there are comments read them, they can reveal fake or damaged files.
Go to the “File Name” tab and recheck to see if the majority of the names mentioned there match the file you are downloading. Don’t panic if you see that there is only one or two different names for the file – this might be due to innocent user mistakes. However, stop downloading if you see that most of the sources for this file refer to it with an irrelevant name. E.g. you download Beatles, but most of your sources refer to your file as being a porn movie, etc.
There are files on the network that were created to fool users. These are true fake files since they are usually files full of binary zeros. These files respond to eMule’s built in compression in a very strange way, you will see the file either transferring unusually fast (sometimes at speeds higher than your limit) or you will see the file transferring at a normal speed but the progress bar will get full very fast. If you see one of these things happening to some of your downloads, they should be fakes.
If you encounter a search result that is definitely fake, do not download the file, of course, but also right click on it and select the “Mark as Spam” option.
