Although Perl is a great tool for this sort of thing, there are others
as well, most notably Procmail. And there's an excellent filter
system called the Spam Bouncer which consists of a bunch of procmail
scripts which does just what you want. See http://www.spambouncer.org/
for more info.
--Bill.
Scott R. Godin writes:
has anyone implemented a 'better version' of the vacation program for
themselves?
I'm particularly interested in 'screening' the bulk-mail type messages
that list me in their bcc: header so that my address does not show up
in the from: or cc: address listings, thus preventing
/usr/bin/vacation from triggering and sending the response. =:P (fat lot
of good that does me)
I've noticed that near 99% of the spam I receive uses this method to
mask it from reciept, so typically I filter this with my mailer into a
dumping ground, but the sheer amount of spam lately (235 items since Nov
5th) has caused me to form a desire to tackle this more forthrightly and
aggressively.
Ideally, it should return the offending mail to postmaster@* (where * is
the supposed 'from' address) to report the abuse, and include a full
copy of the original message including headers (along with a nice terse
little message regarding the laws involved). Additionally it would be
nice if it could forward the spam to my OWN postmaster for additional
reportage and filtering at their end.
I'm quite unsure how to go about this. I'm loathe to start messing with
it without some direction, against the possibility of perhaps breaking
things or doing it VERY wrongly and seriously pissing off my own
postmaster hehe ;) without some starting point references to work from,
and I don't have a testbed here to play with, until my friend finishes
the work on the redhat box he's been tossing together for me in his free
time. :-)
Can you kind folks offer some pointers to me as to how I can go about
such a task, and what would be some of the traps and pitfalls to avoid
(of which I'm quite sure there are many) in the process?
I'm very anxious to get back at these spamming bastards somehow, as this
intrusion into my personal e-mail is MOST unwelcome, and I've got a
growing passion to stamp out this *expletive deleted* practice as often
as I can.
Hitting them where it hurts with *minimal* manual intervention, seems
the best way. ;D
I've considered also, the possibility of stuffing them in a database,
and then periodically checking it interactively with the program, and
triggering 'bounce' type messages to said postmasters on a specific
basis -- as this way I don't auto-trigger I'm-annoyed-by-your-spam
responses for *legitimate* 'bcc' messages.
something sort of like an
$ ~/bin/vacation.pl -X (where X will be whatever flag I decide on to
enter the database processing stage)
You have (n) messages in your holding cell. Proceed? (y/n) _
list of from/subject lines, numbered
Enter a Selected line number, or 'a' for all. [#/a] _
message headers
Preview, Accept, Bounce, Delete [p/a/b/d]? _
(if Preview is selected)
message body
Accept, Bounce, Delete,
Mark-this-Entire-Domain-as-SPAM-source-for-all-time-and-bounce-and-report
-all-instances :D [a/b/d/m]? _m
Domain 'btamail.net.cn' Captured. OK?
Return to accept, or enter corrections: _
(where (A)ccept could possibly add the From address to a list of
acceptable e-mails that get passed through automatically from then on.
:-) as well as passing the mail on to my proper inbox, just like a
\$user in my .forward file would.
this is just a stray shell account, that I retain around on my prior ISP
for testing purposes, perl-wise, and in case some people still haven't
upgraded their addressbooks, so delaying the mail a bit won't kill me.
(particularly considering the volume of spam it's recieving lately) I
don't even get 1/20th the amount of spam to other accounts I have. :/
With enough pointers, I think I can complete the beastie -- I mean I DO
have a pretty complete 'vision' of what I want. :-) I just need some
pointers on how to get there. I'll happily contribute this pup to the
CPAN scripts archive if I can get it working exactly the way I want it
to. I'm SURE some of you could find a use for it. ;)
Your thoughts and contemplations are anticipated with great desire and
gleeful hand-rubbings and evil-grinning eyebrow-wagglings to Make it
so.
If stuff like this isn't one of the things that makes Perl so fun I
dunno what is. :D
(note that while I'm sort of broad-casting my initial hopes on this to
four groups on perl.org (perl.scripts, perl.beginners,
perl.macperl.anyperl, perl.fwp), I'm confining responses (via reply-to
and followup-to) to
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
aka nntp://nntp.perl.org/perl.scripts/
to consolidate things and reduce the required effort of following this
thread to a single track. I hope this is the proper way to go about it
-- despite years of experience with cross-posting
