Re: Holy Spam!
On Fri, 03 Oct 2003 13:25:16 -0400, Dan Anderson <dan@mathjunkies.com> penned:
> I've had very good success with the following:
>
> 1) Send all e-mails with your name not listed as a receipient to a
> probable spam folder. After a few weeks of tweaking (mailing lists and
> newsletters will get send there too) you will find just about everything
> in there the probable spam folder is spam -- and can be deleted
> accordingly.
> 2) Anytime a major virus comes up filter out common text in the message
> body if it comes through.
>
> The following are useful if you know a language like Perl and can pipe
> your mail through it (not very hard):
> 3) (A little more tricky) Create "Whitelists" -- people who you know you
> can trust. Any mail from these people gets sent to your inbox -- don't
> accidentally delete an important e-mail!
> 4) Anything with .pif, .bat, .exe attached is probably spam. Quarantine
> it (unless it's from your somebody on your whitelist).
> 5) Make anybody e-mailing to your address who is not on your whitelist
> (besides listservs!) respond to an automatic reply to be added to your
> whitelist. Most spammers won't respond (although people on the listserv
> may get angry and block your e-mail. See caveat re: listservs).
> 6) Keep a listserv list and other lists in a database so it is portable
> wherever you go.
>
> This has successfully helped me send over 2k emails to /dev/null today.
> I highly recommend it.
>
> -Dan
>
I do all of the above with spamassassin and tmda. I don't use the
challenge/response method; instead I changed the default action to
"hold," so that I can look at unfamiliar email when *I* want to. You
can also change the default action to deliver to some mailbox for later
perusal. (tmda's c/r system is fairly smart about not emailing
challenges to lists, though.)
I find tmda's rule syntax a lot easier to handle than procmail's, but I
use procmail, too, for some prefiltering.
There are a ton of anti-spam and mail-filtering packages out there;
putting them in place properly may take some time, but it sure has
reduced my frustration level.
--
monique
Please respond to the group OR to my email, but not both. (Group preferred.)
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