Re: smail 3.1.29.1-22 append_header="..." problem

[Craig Sanders <cas@muffin.pronet.com>]

On Tue, 30 Apr 1996, eckes wrote:

> The remove and append_header statements are generic transport
> attributesd, and therefore have to be put BEFORE the ;

Thanks, that bit of information was exactly what I needed to know.

> smtp:	driver=tcpsmtp, max_addrs=100, -max_chars, inet,
> [...deleted...]
> 
> should work.

Yep, sure does.

Now ALL mail outbound from this system has an X-No-Junk-Mail header attached
to it.  Perfect.

Speaking of junk e-mail, I did some more work on my junkmail daemon
today. junkmail is an autoresponder I wrote to "deal with" the
ever-increasing amount of unsolicited commercial email I receive every
day.  Instead of getting angry and writing a very nasty reply (usually
starting off with F*** Off & Die), I just bounce it to user junkmail on
my system, delete it and forget about it. 

junkmail extracts relevant headers, and writes the message (along with a
little note explaining how evil junkmail is) into a job queue.

A cron job running as junkmail iterates through the queue and returns a
copy of the junk back to the evil perpetrator once every hour.  Each job
gets 100 runs before being automatically deleted.

The new version now keeps a database of all From addresses and Subject
lines, and randomly selects one of each every time it sends out a
message.  It then fakes the From address and uses the random subject
line to make it more difficult for email spammers to automatically
filter out the return.  Hopefully it will also start interesting dialogs
between the various spammers :-).

I've even got a junkq command to list the current job queue :-)

$ junkq
1795-830741827 "Have you seen. . ." to Isabel <104275.2012@compuserve.com> (60 left)


Anyone out there interested in this?  If there's enough interest, I may
get it into shape for release as a debian package.  It requires creation
of an account called junkmail.  The new version also requires junkmail
to be listed as a trusted user (so it can fake the from address) in the
smail config file.

planned enhancements include:
  - sending a copy to the spammers' postmaster if it it's the first
    run.
  - junkq will be able to manage the queue (delete jobs, increase or
    decrease number of runs left, etc).
  - i might implement a "lottery": a 1 in 100 chance of getting a uuencoded
    copy of my /vmlinux attached to the message.  


This software has greatly reduced the levels of anger and stress I used
to get from receiving junkmail.  Now, instead of it being an annoying
hassle, I look on it as a chance to do some more testing on my software
as well as incentive to add new features :-)

Craig