Hello Glen Lee Edwards,
Once you wrote about "Re: test post":
> Thanks, Leonid.
You are welcome anytime ;-)
>
> I suppose that one way to set this up would be to take every list that I
> have mail coming in from; ^TO.*<listname>, have this mail sorted to the
> specific folders. Then have mail addressed directly to me;
> ^TO.*(glenlee|GLEdwards) sent to a special folder. That should take care
> of all expected mail. Anything that isn't filtered by the above goes to
> /dev/null. Is there some way in Procmail to return a letter to the sender
> with a rejection message? I'm currently doing this from /etc/mail/deny.
Well, it is OK as a general idea. You can send automatic replies to
rejected mail authors, although I personally would not recommend it.
As a matter of fact, the way most spam companies are working is the
following: they get a list of e-mails (some of those may not be
working by the time) and send a message to them. If they get a reply
from the address which is not an error, they use the address as alive
one. That is the reason you can see the line "Reply with the word
'unsubscribe' to be unsubscribed from this mailing list" in most of the
letters. People are naive. They e-mail back. The company that
recieves the reply sees that the address is alive and someone is
checking mail on it, so they send you even more spam. So, the
automatic reply will generate more mail for your box, and will
request more resources for filtering.
Instead, what you can do is copy all incoming messages before filtering
to the special mailbox/mailfolder. You can check it occasionally, or
in case that you know that someone sent to you something and you
have not recieved it.
By the way, additionally to checking TO: field of the messages, you
may want to check the Subject: and X-Sender: fields. Also you
can look for certain patterns in the body of the message.
For the examples of effective procmail usage check out "man procmailex".
>
> Some Linux lists are using a service called http://mail-abuse.org to
> filter out spammers. Problem with this service is that it not only
> focuses on known spammers, it also checks for certain Linux mailer
> configurations, and if you have this configuration your mail is rejected
> from the list even if you've never sent a spam mail in your life. It's
> the Hitler mentality. Hitler slaughtered legions of Jews because he
> believed they had the potential for world economic domination and because
> he considered them to be an inferior race. They weren't slaughtered
> because of personal crimes they as individuals committed, but because they
> had the potential to do so. mail-abuse.org follows this lead, rejecting
> mail sent from Linux boxes with certain configurations because they have
> the potential to spam, not because they have.
>
Yes, this policy exists. What above-mentioned servers are doing, is
checking mail servers for the relay permissions. You can do it yourself,
by completing following telneting to the server on 25th port and trying
to send mail from [EMAIL PROTECTED] to [EMAIL PROTECTED] (or any other
obscure addresses). If you will get message saying "Relaying denied", you
are OK. If instead you will get something like "Recipient OK" and "Sender
OK", then you host allows relay. You will NEED to reconfigure you mail
server software. Read the documention for more details.
> Big brother is coming. In a computer dominated society once he controls
> all our boxes he controls us.
...actually, I think that millions of Big Brothers are coming and they will
live in nice Big [Brother] Community ;-)
--
Best regards,
Leonid Mamtchenkov
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Quote : Old programmers never die; they exit to a higher shell.
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