Re: How to filter out mailing list spam with bogofilter

[Nigel Henry <cave.dnb@tiscali.fr>]

On Friday 11 January 2008 21:28, Sjoerd Hiemstra wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Jan 2008 20:12:06 +0100 Nigel Henry wrote:
> > I have a separate mailbox for the Debian-user list, and when the spam
> > flood was in full flow everything turned up in this mailbox, ham, and
> > spam, so no spam from the Debian list was sent to the wastebin.
>
> I've got Sylpheed with bogofilter integrated.
> In the 'junk mail' settings there's this option: 'Filter junk mails
> before normal filtering'.
> When checked, bogofilter captures all spam mails from the list, that is,
> spam mails with the d-u address somewhere in the headers.
>
> If your d-u filter (putting the list mail into your d-u folder) gets the
> mail first, apparently these messages get out of reach of other filters.
>
> I suppose KMail has a similar setting after bogofilter is added.
>
>
> BTW: although bogofilter does not mark a message as spam if it is not
> sure about it, it does mark messages as spam if it *is* sure about it.
> I've inspected some 20,000 messages that were sent to the spam folder,
> and none of them was falsely marked as spam.
> It appears to be safe to send the messages that are marked as spam to
> the trash folder directly.

When I setup bogofilter on Kmail, I set filters for various mailing lists to 
run before bogofilter. Then we had a spam flood on the d-u list (that was 
some time back though), so I moved the d-u list so that what was put into it 
was after bogofilter had processed the downloaded messages. I thought this 
had fixed the problem, but the Debian folks had fixed the spam problem, so 
there was no way to tell. 

With the recent spam flood, what I thought was a fix, was not, and all the 
mailing list spam still turned up in the d-u box.

I'm still using Kmail on FC2 for downloading my mail, and it's possible that 
later versions of Kmail have better ways, and more options for dealing with 
spam.

I'm still working on the problem, and according to replies on the bogofilter 
list you can setup an ignorelist.db. As far as I understand it, you can put a 
header from a legit d-u message in the ignorelist.db, then when you check 
your mail, bogofilter will ignore headers from the d-u list, and concentrate 
on the body of the messages.

I've yet to find out how to set this up, but am working on it. of course it 
doesn't help that the spam from the list has virtually stopped now, so have 
almost no mailing list spam to test this out with.

Anyway, no spam, no problemo.

Thanks for the reply Sjoerd.

Nigel.