On 22 Jan 2004 04:35:31 -0800, John <jandj.lee@ntlworld.com> wrote:
There are some here (note that they are spam-fighting professionals [or worse]
that are creating work for their friends and themselves) that are advising you
to find another email service provider because your ISP is doing no server-
side spam filtering.

The truth is that you have a very GOOD ISP: The sorts of filtering that
ISPs do for spam are more-than-likely to block mail that you WANT to get
and will still let plenty of spam through.

For example, I can't any mail from friends of mine that use comcast.net
because the Earthlink spam filters block ALL mail from them because they
are on a dnsbl (dns blacklist) and their filters reference that list.

One person with a different ISP had to try *5* times to get to me, and it only
worked when they changed the Subject: The spam filters at earthlink decided
that their original Subject could only be found on spam. They changed the
filter without notice, of course...

But they DO let through TONS of bulk mail that isn't addressed to me,
which at least one person here has very incorrectly implied they don't.


You are much better off doing your own filtering.

Install procmail and create a passlist at the top of your ~/.procmailrc with
recipes like this:

:0:
* ^From.*yourfriend@their.isp
inbox

For mailing lists:

:0:
* ^Return-Path.*whater@it.is
that_mailbox

And then kill most of the bulk mail with:

:0
* ! ^To: your@address.whatever$
/dev/null

(if it's not addressed soley to you, dump it)


Procmail is quite easy to use and has great manpages.

procmail procmailrc procmailex



Be very careful about any advice you get here about spamfighting.

There are 3 groups: spammers, professional spamfighters, and people who
hire spammers (THEIR spam is not REALLY spam, of course...) that do NOT
want you to know how to truly take control of your mailbox.

All 3 groups are very much invested in filtering strategies that DON'T work
very well at all.

All 3 groups are stray or out-of-work if people use strategies that
ARE effective.

I strongly suspect that many spammers hang out here and pretend to be
spamfighters, based on the fact that they are dead-set against the use
of C-Rs in spam filters, which are used by the only people I know that
have truly taken back control of their own mailboxes.

They are the last stage in the 3 stage filter I began to describe above.


Here's the simplest of implementations. It sends out an auto-response
to the address on the mail and dumps the mail itself:


:0
|(formail -r; cat ~/cr) | $SENDMAIL -t

(this has Re: whatever on the Subject line and does not include the
body of the original mail)

Any mail that isn't passlisted and IS addressed solely to you is sent a
note that looks something like this:

(This is the file ~/cr, edit at will)
------------------------------------------
Greetings.

Spam is a real problem here, so I must ask you to
re-send your mail and paste the password below on
the Subject line.

This needs to be done only once: Performing this
small favor will result in your address being
passlisted here.

U)U9834xx45-TL

Thanks for your patience.

John Smith
-----------------------------------------



So your ~/.procmailrc would look something very much like this:



------------------------------------------------

PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin
MAILDIR=~/Mail


# this captures any returned C-R mail

:0
* ^Subject.*U)U9834xx45-TL
inbox


# then one for each regular contact


:0:
* ^From.*yourfriend@their.isp
inbox


# and one for each mailing list

:0:
* ^Return-Path.*whater@it.is
that_mailbox


# And then kill most of the bulk mail with:

:0
* ! ^To: your@address.whatever$
/dev/null


:0
|(formail -r; cat ~/cr) | $SENDMAIL -t


# if the mail headers are so screwed up that it couldn't be processed
# by the above recipes, you don't want to see it:

:0
/dev/null

------------------------------

See:


http://www.uwasa.fi/~ts/info/spamfoil.html


AC

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On 2004-01-22, Alan Connor <zzzzzz@xxx.yyy> wrote:
The above certainly applies to any advice given by Alan Connor!

- --keith

- --
kkeller-usenet@wombat.san-francisco.ca.us
(try just my userid to email me)
AOLSFAQ=http://wombat.san-francisco.ca.us/cgi-bin/fom

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Keith Keller wrote:

Just look out for the Joe-jobs his C/R system will provide
--
Linux is not a desktop OS for people whose VCRs are still
flashing "12:00".*************************--*Paul*Tomblin

Alan Connor <zzzzzz@xxx.yyy> writes:

So how come my father (who has an Earthlink account) can get and send
email from/to me? I have a comcast account.

[ the rest deleted unseen ]

Joe
--
I think people should be able to make up their own minds for me
- Monty Python

So many people that are into computers want to make a living with them,
and what could be more obvious than selling something over the internet?

(the Internet only needs so many Sysadmins...)


Which means advertising, doesn't it?

Which means SPAM.


So they don't REALLY want you to know how to get spam out of your life,
do they?


Just the OTHER guy's spam.

THEIR spam isn't REALLY spam....

Just ask them.


Therefore you will find them promoting tools like SpamShuffler (SpamAssasin)

which they are VERY good with and know how to beat!

How about that? Big surprise.


(Oops! I seem to have deleted the other posts here.)



AC

--
ed(1)
25K of troll-control
The perfect Usenet editor/pager

On Thu, 22 Jan 2004 21:28:34 +0000, Alan Connor wrote:

And the fact that most of your C-Rs waste Internet resources (by either
going nowhere, or going to someone other than the spammer) doesn't bother
you one whit?

Goddamn, you're selfish.

I can get past your killfile any time I want (except that I don't want)
by getting a new free webmail account somewhere, sending you a short
plaintext note, and answering the C-R. So much for your "control"!

Alan's net.kookery notwithstanding, the only way to /control/ your
mailbox is to turn it off completely. You can /influence/ it in many
different ways; C-R is one way, but it's selfish and wasteful.

Alan Connor wrote:



Or try spam assassin, Iḿ still getting it configured and teaching it how
to behave but so far it´s doing a pretty good job. Another solution is
to install Thunderbird as your mail reader, it has some pretty go
inbuilt spam learning capabilities.

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On 2004-01-23, Thor <thor@valhalla.bbs.nz> wrote:
You haven't been reading Alan's posts very carefully, have you?
He's been ranting all through this thread against SpamAssassin.
(I'm guessing it's because he was unable to configure it correctly;
it seems like anything he doesn't understand must suck.)

- --keith

- --
kkeller-usenet@wombat.san-francisco.ca.us
(try just my userid to email me)
AOLSFAQ=http://wombat.san-francisco.ca.us/cgi-bin/fom

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On Fri, 23 Jan 2004 17:45:01 +1300, Thor <thor@valhalla.bbs.nz> wrote:
I don't know Thunderbird, but if you are going to use filters that just
look for patterns in the headers and body, do scoring on what it finds
and reference dnsbl, (etc) then you are going to get spam, and have to save
the rest to look through to make sure your filter isn't eating mail you want
to get.

(a lot of people apparently enjoy this.....)

The problem with using this approach *alone* (over-relying on it) is that the
world's foremost experts in these kind of filters are spammers.

I just prefer not to mess with spam at all. I don't want to see it and
I don't want to think about it.

If you are willing to put the work into it, Spam-Shuffler is better than
nothing, of course. You just can't ever trust it, because as soon as you
think you have it configured perfectly, the spammers will have a new trick.

It/they work better on paper than in the real world :-)

AC

Alan Connor <zzzzzz@xxx.yyy> writes:

I only partially agree. Stuff does get thru.
Here is some data instead of baseless assertions:

dane-2> ls -1 SPAM|wc -l
975
dane-2> ls -1 spam-missed|wc -l
2

False positives 0 but I admit I stopped looking a long time ago.

That's about a weeks data.

Spamassassin, and razor-2.

I spend time adjusting the rules, but less than a minute a day
and its for a group of users, not just me.

PS: I have a job. That means C/R is not appropriate.

On Fri, 23 Jan 2004 08:54:39 -0500, Dan Espen <daneNO@SPAM.mk.telcordia.com> wrote:
If you can call what I have to say "baseless assertions" without having any
rationale for doing so beyond your own imagination, then your "data" can't
be worth much.


The rest deleted unseen.


AC
--
ed(1)
25K of troll-control
The perfect Usenet editor/pager

Alan Connor <zzzzzz@xxx.yyy> writes:

There must be some kind of twisted logic in there but I can't find it.

I guess I just used data to form my rationale.
Silly me.

Cool. I think I've finally learned my lesson.
Bye.

<aside>
slap...resist temptation...slap..resist temt....oh, hell with it...
</aside>

On Fri, 23 Jan 2004 at 19:37 GMT, Dan Espen wrote:
I think AC was right; your data wasn't worth much. After all, it
came from AC's own posts.

--
Chris F.A. Johnson http://cfaj.freeshell.org
================================================== =================
My code (if any) in this post is copyright 2004, Chris F.A. Johnson
and may be copied under the terms of the GNU General Public License

On Fri, 23 Jan 2004 14:37:59 -0500, Dan Espen <daneNO@SPAM.mk.telcordia.com> wrote:
You can't?

Then please tell us all how you know that my assertions are baseless?

The mere fact that you even HAVE spam statistics serves to prove one of
my points.

(I am assuming that this was the "data" you published in your last post.)

Know how many spams have made it into my mailbox in the last 4 months or
so?

TWO.

(one from the Australian government about tourism and one from one of those
con artists claiming to be the former chief advisor to a deposed African
dictator with a pile of gold.....you know the type.....they were both promptly
blocklisted [two keystrokes] and that was the end of them)

Know how much time I have spent on making this happen?

0 hours 0 minutes 0 seconds.

Know how easy it is to get in touch with me if I *want* you to?

Effortless: 5 seconds to return a C-R, once in a lifetime.

The rest deleted unseen, for the same reason I didn't read the balance of
your last post.

You don't make any SENSE.

AC

--
ed(1)
25K of troll-control
The perfect Usenet editor/pager

On 23 Jan 2004 19:46:03 GMT, Chris F.A. Johnson <c.fa.johnson@rogers.com> wrote:

Oops! I deleted the rest of this without seeing it....

<chortle>


AC
--
ed(1)
25K of troll-control
The perfect Usenet editor/pager

In article <QtfQb.25029$zj7.19469@newsread1.news.pas.earthlin k.net>,
Alan Connor <xxxx@yyy.zzz> wrote:
Isn't it amazing how AC can tell that the contents of a
post are distasteful to him without even reading it?

John
--
Wallingford, Oxfordshire, England
We had a woodhenge here once but it rotted.

John Winters wrote:

Yes, and amazing how often he can repeat that feat.
Interesting also that it always happens with posts somewhat critical of him
--
Microsoft software doesn't get released - it escapes, leaving
a trail of destruction behind it.

Peter Köhlmann wrote:
He does not have to read posts critical of him. SpamAssassin does it for
him and removes those whose bodies contain the critical messages. ;-)

--
.~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642.
/V\ Registered Machine 73926.
/( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org
^^-^^ 12:55pm up 18 days, 21 min, 2 users, load average: 2.23, 2.11, 2.09

On Sat, 24 Jan 2004 12:57:42 -0500, Jean-David Beyer <j@d.b> wrote:
The rest deleted unseen.


AC
--
ed(1)
25K of troll-control
The perfect Usenet editor/pager

Alan Connor wrote:
the necessity of posting to everyone in this newsgroup that you did not
read my post.

--
.~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642.
/V\ Registered Machine 73926.
/( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org
^^-^^ 3:15pm up 18 days, 2:40, 5 users, load average: 2.08, 2.12, 2.17