Anthony Green writes:
> Hi,
>
> This was a thought I had while deleteing spam mail and was wondering if
> it could be done via a Mutt macro or otherwise. Couldnt really see anything
> on mutt.org for dealing with spam.
>
> Ok .. so rather than just deleting a spam mail, I was thinking to generate
> a authentic mailer daemon failure message and then send that back to the
> sender. So, although I have received the message, Im sending a failure
> message back which says my address is undeliverable / unknown etc.
>
> Kind of like having a forged mail message from postmaster/mailser daemon
> already setup which inserts the relevant spam email and sends it back
> as a failure etc.
>
> Sure it wont work for some cases of spam where the reply-to address isnt set
> or set wrong, but for the cases that it does work it may get your email
> address removed from a spam mailing list.
>
> After you run the macro .. or from the macro itself, it would then delete
> the spam message once the failure message has been sent to the spammer.
>
> Anyone have any ideas on the above, or any ideas in general about controlling
> spam?
Fighting spam at the MUA level is no good. After all, at that stage your
mail system has already been abused.
If you're using procmail, you can set up a bounce recipe, modeled after some
generic mailer daemon message (do *not* use EXITCODE, it will expose the
.forward). Via rblcheck, one can even use the various Realtime Blackhole
Lists with procmail.
The (arguably) best way to fight spam is at the MTA/incoming SMTP level.
Both postfix and newer sendmails provide excellent options in this area.
There must be gobs of anti-spam links out there, and I'm quite busy right
now, but you could start at www.cause.org or www.junkemail.org.
