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• Join hands against spam (posted 2002-04-28 22:11:18 by icculus):
  

  I got spam-bombed today.

  It's actually my own dumb fault. I got my old lokigames.com email address forwarded (since the kind folks hosting the domain now are somewhat friendlier than my ex-employer). Somewhere in the back of my mind, I'm imagining that my one true love is out there, clutching a Loki business card in her hand. A tear runs down her cheek as each attempt to contact me results in a heartless qmail bounce message.

  If my one true love is out there, she's is really sending a lot of mail to that lokigames account. She's desperately trying to sell me herbal viagra and lower my mortage rates. She tells me that cell phones can cause cancer; she's so concerned about me. She sends me these messages ten to twenty times per hour. The course of true love never did run smooth.

  It's time to set up some spam filtering on icculus.org. I've updated Bundle::CPAN (which upgrades a million other Perl modules), installed Vipul's Razor and Mail::SpamAssassin

  (While I'm upgrading, I also upgraded GNU wget, because I like 1.8.1's "interface" better than 1.5.3's. Not that that's important right now.)

  SpamAssassin can perform a bunch of tests to determine if a given mail is spam.

  Generally speaking, the quickest way to defeat spam is to insert this line at the very top of ~/.qmail on your shell account:

  |/usr/local/bin/ifspamh myloginname-isspam

  (That's a Unix pipe symbol at the front of that.)

  Then, do this once:

  echo "./Mailbox" > ~/.qmail-isspam

  ("Mailbox" should be where qmail normally deposits your mail. If you have no idea, the above line is probably right. Case is important!)

  This will have SpamAssassin check all your incoming mail (passing them through Vipul's Razor, if needed), and modify the messages it thinks are spams before delivering them, so that it is very apparent as to what they are. It will also add interesting information on why it chose it to be a spam.

  Alternately, if you want incoming spam to just vaporize, you can add this to the very top of your ~/.qmail file:

  |/usr/local/bin/ifspamh +

  (That's a Unix pipe symbol at the start of the line.)

  This will check all your incoming mail, and throw out the spam, writing a line for each rejection to ~/.spamlist. If you don't even want the log, do this:

  |/usr/local/bin/ifspamh -

  Do the spamflagging to start, and then keep a log for at least a little while until you are sure you aren't losing mail. Using a '+' or '-' trashes the mail with no way to retrieve it, so you are screwed if a mail is incorrectly identified as spam! This does happen sometimes.

  PLEASE send yourself some test emails to verify the spam filter is working. If there is a problem, all of your incoming mail will be deferred and eventually deleted! You Have Been Warned.

  SpamAssassin is VERY configurable. Do some research in the manpages if you want to customize it for your use.

  As always, please email me with questions and problems. Just don't offer me lower interest rates, because I won't see your message.

  
  --icculus.

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