[Gllug] Spam

[Tom Gilbert]

* Jackson, Harry (HJackson at colt-telecom.com) wrote:
> Hi all
> 
> Quite a while ago I got myself an email account with yahoo and deliberately
> named it a little bit obscure to avoid the obvious Spam. I am now using this
> mail address more and more on public lists so I am getting Spam on a regular
> basis. I am pissed off at this intrusion and have been knocking some ideas
> around in my head as to how I could have it stopped for me as a user. I know
> stopping open relays and the rest of the stuff is probably a pipe dream so
> would it be possible to do something like the following or would it be
> pointless. Could the following be applied to fetchmail or any pop access
> method.
> 
> 
> I only accept mail from people in my address book.
> I will only accept mail from people who have a keyword in the subject line.
> Any missing or non qualified headers and the mail gets dropped.

There are example configs out there for exim etc to do this (it's called
whitelisting), so you can do it at the mta level if you wish, or
obviously at the procmail level, but, well, yuck :)

To be honest most people who would send you mail wouldn't bother
resending with some magic keyword when you bounced their mail. And of
course you'd better be darn sure you get your mailing lists in the
whitelist. I tend to find autoresponders of any kind rather tasteless,
so I wouldn't condone this idea.

Why don't you just set up some decent spam filtering? I don't see any
spam any more, and my procmailrc isn't all that sophisticated
(http://linuxbrit.co.uk/downloads/dot.procmailrc). There are decent
tools nowadays, like spamassassin, which are even easier to set up, if
you like..

Tom.
-- 
   .^.    .-------------------------------------------------------.
   /V\    | Tom Gilbert, London, England | http://linuxbrit.co.uk |
 /(   )\  | Open Source/UNIX consultant  | tom at linuxbrit.co.uk    |
  ^^-^^   `-------------------------------------------------------'

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug