on Mon, Dec 18, 2000 at 07:37:39AM +0100, Jonathan Gift (jgift@wanadoo.fr) wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm getting spammed by people offering me degress and whatnot. Is this
> proverbial kill file another filter listed at te end of my .procmailrc,
> or something sourced from somewhere else? Any pointers in how to set one
> up apreciated. Especially one that can be easily added to...
I've set up and am using Lars Wirzenius's procmail recipes, available
as the Debian 'spamfilter' package.
They're pretty good, but there are some things you should be aware of.
First, I'd suggest the following as a general configuration for setting
up mail filtering rules:
- backup important messages
- cron-subroutine
- handle duplicate messages
- handle DAEMON MESSAGES
- handle plus addressed message (RFC plus or sendmail plus addresses)
- handle server requests (file server, ping responder...)
- drop MAILING LIST messages
- send possible vacation replies only after all above
- apply kill file
- detect mime and format or modify the message body
- save private messages
- and last: FILTER UBE.
My own inclination is to use a default deny policy. I'm seeing huge
proportions of Asia-originating spam -- jp, cn, kr, and uunet.com, are
probably my primary sources. I'd like to be able to set this up at the
ISP level so that I can automatically reject all mail known to be spam,
but am currently stuck with dealing with it after I've downloaded it via
fetchmail.
WRT spamfilter:
- If you're not familiar with it, procmail rules are somewhat complex,
and Lars is an adept. Working out what's going on is complicated
for newbies.
- TURN OFF THE AUTORESPONDER. The easiest way is to add a negation to
the rule in ~/.procmail/rules/spam.rules:
* !
...prior to the sendmail rule.
- Enable logging, and I'd highly encourage verbose logging.
- Go over your mailing list filter rules very carefully. Anything you
don't catch here will be treated as spam. I really pissed off a
list admin (and author of a software package I'm quite interested
in) by autoresponding to a post of his as spam. Not to mention Theo
de Raat's response on OpenBSD-misc last week.... Great OS, but man,
what a personality....
- The greylist rules are broken and don't properly identify all list
mail. They also trap my list *responses* to a couple of lists
incorrectly, meaning my posts don't show in folder. This is
annoying to say the least.
Other than that (and yes, I sometimes do ask myself if it's been worth
the trouble), the filters are effective. I get some 500+ pieces of mail
a day, subscribe to over a dozen lists, and see a fair bit of personal
mail. I've found a few pieces of miscategorized mail, one or two items
of miscategorized spam, and a slightly more substantial amount of mail
which turns up in my greylist. But the bulk of spam is properly sorted.
What I'm working on now is tools to handle spam responses for me.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
Evangelist, Zelerate, Inc. http://www.zelerate.org
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? There is no K5 cabal
http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ http://www.kuro5hin.org
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