Re: Insidious Spam/swen/Garbage
On (25/10/03 01:14), David Jardine wrote:
> 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?
Only if you have a pop3 account, in which case you can preconnect mailfilter
before fetchmail to remove most of this stuff from the server before
collecting your mail.
see various .mailfilterrc files post in the last few weeks. Some
filter on size. I use a combination of Subject, From and To headers to
filter most of it out. Let me know if you want my rc file.
Regards
Clive
--
http://www.clivemenzies.co.uk
strategies for business
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