On Fri, 03 Oct 2003 13:25:16 -0400, Dan Anderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> penned: > I've had very good success with the following: > > 1) Send all e-mails with your name not listed as a receipient to a > probable spam folder. After a few weeks of tweaking (mailing lists and > newsletters will get send there too) you will find just about everything > in there the probable spam folder is spam -- and can be deleted > accordingly. > 2) Anytime a major virus comes up filter out common text in the message > body if it comes through. > > The following are useful if you know a language like Perl and can pipe > your mail through it (not very hard): > 3) (A little more tricky) Create "Whitelists" -- people who you know you > can trust. Any mail from these people gets sent to your inbox -- don't > accidentally delete an important e-mail! > 4) Anything with .pif, .bat, .exe attached is probably spam. Quarantine > it (unless it's from your somebody on your whitelist). > 5) Make anybody e-mailing to your address who is not on your whitelist > (besides listservs!) respond to an automatic reply to be added to your > whitelist. Most spammers won't respond (although people on the listserv > may get angry and block your e-mail. See caveat re: listservs). > 6) Keep a listserv list and other lists in a database so it is portable > wherever you go. > > This has successfully helped me send over 2k emails to /dev/null today. > I highly recommend it. > > -Dan >
I do all of the above with spamassassin and tmda. I don't use the challenge/response method; instead I changed the default action to "hold," so that I can look at unfamiliar email when *I* want to. You can also change the default action to deliver to some mailbox for later perusal. (tmda's c/r system is fairly smart about not emailing challenges to lists, though.) I find tmda's rule syntax a lot easier to handle than procmail's, but I use procmail, too, for some prefiltering. There are a ton of anti-spam and mail-filtering packages out there; putting them in place properly may take some time, but it sure has reduced my frustration level. -- monique Please respond to the group OR to my email, but not both. (Group preferred.) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
