Re: Insidious Spam/swen/Garbage
On Fri, Oct 24, 2003 at 10:55:20PM +0100, Karsten M. Self wrote:
> on Fri, Oct 24, 2003 at 07:39:11AM -0700, John Yurcik (jyyc73@yahoo.com) wrote:
>
> > Hi, I am glad to be on this list-even if it seems like one has to wade
> > through crocodiles to be here. I got a yahoo e-mail account because I
> > thought that I could manage this junk that accumulates in my mail.
> > "Microsoft security update" always some odd addressee, 142 or 154kb.
>
> Google "Swen virus".
>
> > It doesn't appear that blocking this stuff works,probably because
> > different addresses keep being generated. Yahoo does recognize 95% of
> > it but it ends up in my bulk mail. Is there something I can do to
> > block this stuff with an on-line mail account?
>
> Your options are:
>
> - Check mail frequently. There's a yahoo-based mail fetch utility
> packaged for Debian.
>
> - Find better filtering offered through Yahoo. I don't use it, so I
> can't offer suggestions.
>
> - Switch email providers. There are numerous options that filter out
> most or all spam. pobox.com is one I've heard recommended, though
> there are others. Self-hosting is one of the better solutions.
>
> - Stick your head in the sand. If you hide, nobody can find you.
> Maybe. If you're lucky. If someone doesn't out you.
I don't understand why this should have to be a problem for
someone (like me) who is an ordinary user with a dialup account
that accumulates half a dozen or a dozen of these things a day.
I had a temporary solution, using
fetchmail --limit 100000
which left the swen stuff on the server. Ron Johnson kindly sent
me a Python script that deleted all the large files from the
server. All right, I had seen these messages piling up and
guessed, from the length, that they were all swen, although it is
theoretically possible that I deleted something that was not swen.
It is beyond my capability (but only slightly, I feel, and it
should be very easy for lots of people here) to produce a sort of
interactive fetchmail that reads the headers of each message on
the server, presents them to you and asks if you want to fetch
the message or delete it. This is what I would like to have.
I've read the fetchmail documentation and concluded that fetchmail
will never delete anything without consulting exim or whatever.
I've tried to follow all the contributions to this list on the
subject. Have I missed something?
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