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don warner saklad [don.saklad at gmail.com]
For users of RMAIL in Emacs, how do you deal with spam messages?...
Not all messages appear with SpamAssassin headers.
Ben Okopnik [ben at linuxgazette.net]
On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 08:51:32AM -0400, don warner saklad wrote:
> For users of RMAIL in Emacs, how do you deal with spam messages?...
I would think that it would be the same as everyone else. Whatever client you choose to use is irrelevant - spam filtering happens before that stage.
The email chain looks like this, assuming a typical end-user to end-user interaction and POP:
1. User1 composes and sends a message to User2, which is handled by User1's SMTP host.
2. That SMTP host contacts User2's SMTP host and transfers the mail there, where it's stored for retrieval.
3. User2 retrieves the mail from that host via POP, processes it, and stores it in a local mbox, where it's available for reading.
Obviously, if User1 is a spammer, there's no hope of doing anything at stage 1; both the outgoing email client and the SMTP server are going to be under his control. Stage 2, however, gives us a pretty good opportunity: we can use SPF (Sender Policy Framework) or other, similar tools to do SMTP-time spam rejection - possibly one of the most effective tools in the arsenal. This, however, requires a cooperative system administrator - and that's not always the case. At that point, we have to deal with everything at stage 3 - which involves filtering such as Spamassassin, etc. On the one hand, this places the burden of filtering on the user and requires him to be well-educated about spam, etc.; on the other hand, it allows for precise custom configuration.
If 'procmail' is installed on your system, the easiest approach would be to configure it (via your ~/.procmailrc) to handle spam - or, better yet, send it to the latest generation of anti-spam software for further processing. I wrote an article about that a while back: http://linuxgazette.net/issue62/okopnik.html
> Not all messages appear with SpamAssassin headers.
Perhaps some of your upstream hosts don't use SA, while some others do.
-- * Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *
don warner saklad [don.saklad at gmail.com]
Thank you Ben Okopnik !
It's going to be years before I've learned enough to wrap my brain around http://linuxgazette.net/issue62/okopnik.html
I'm told it's possibly exim, whatever that is.
Ben Okopnik [ben at linuxgazette.net]
Hi, Don -
On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 02:00:52PM -0400, don warner saklad wrote:
> Thank you Ben Okopnik !
You're welcome - glad I could help.
> It's going to be years before I've learned enough to wrap my brain around > http://linuxgazette.net/issue62/okopnik.html
Feel free to ask if there's anything in there that you don't understand.
I have a feeling that the author is a friendly, helpful sort of fellow,
and would be willing to explain things in detail. 
> I'm told it's possibly exim, whatever that is.
Exim is the MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) that's responsible for sending (and in some cases, receiving) mail. It couples quite well with procmail, which is the processor that I covered in that article - in fact, I think that I was running Exim at that time as well.
The article itself is essentially a series of instructions and explanations that tell you how to set up your own spam filter.
-- * Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *
Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]
Hey, it's the legendary Don Saklad, the man with his own tribute pages!
Quoting don warner saklad (don.saklad@gmail.com):
> For users of RMAIL in Emacs, how do you deal with spam messages?...
By strong preference, you deal with it _in your MTA_, long before it reaches Emacs/RMAIL (your MUA).
By the time your MTA has already SMTP-250-accepted the mail stream, it's too late to do anything but detect and delete any spam within it. Before acceptance, if you can programmatically determine that a partcular mail is junkmail, you can cause your MTA to say "550 Die spammer, die" (loosely paraphrasing), thus steering deftly between the Scylla of accepting and discarding spam and the Charybdis of accepting and bouncing it (which tends, of course, to create backscatter spam to innocent third parties).
But that didn't actually answer your question as posed, did it?
Technopeasants who don't run their own MTAs are, to use the technical term, screwed. ;-> But, as Ben said separately, you can certainly pass the received mail spool through procmail rulesets, SpamAssassin, etc., to help decide what to throw away.
don warner saklad [don.saklad at gmail.com]
Currently I use...
Esc C-s Regexp to summarize by:
and filter out strings, for example...
watches pill meds