OK, after about 3 hours of mucking about when I should have been
studying, I've come up with a way of keeping your e-mail address to
yourself on usenet, mailing lists, etc. This means that people that
reply to your e-mail will be able to get you, because their MUA will
quote your Message ID (unless its Outlook, but I don't particularly
care if it is, myself... not from mailing lists anyhow) in the
References header.
Requirements:
-------------
- Two e-mail accounts on a qmail box (normal one and new one)
- I do the filtering with Gnus, but you can use whatever the hell you
like.
- Perl (I use v5, should work with v4 as well tho)
Instructions:
-------------
- Create a new account that will receive mail from usenet and lists (I
ingeniously called mine usenet cos Mr Socha has been using that name
in his mails and it makes sense)
- Create a .qmail file in ~usenet:
| bouncesaying "Go away. Spam not accepted here."
- Create a .qmail-default file in ~usenet:
| perl -we "\$valid = 0; while (<>) { if ( /^References\:.*<schultz\S+\@ipsware\.com>/
|) { \$valid = 1; last; } } exit 99 if (\$valid == 0); exit 0;" || bouncesaying "Go
|away. Spam not accepted here."
| forward "me-$LOCAL"
(Of course, replacing 'me' with your real username, and replacing
schultz\S+\@ipsware\.com with the regex for your own message ID (look
it up in one of your posts, or defun message-make-message-id in Gnus).
- Create a .qmail-default file in ~me (whoever you really are):
./Maildir/
- Create account settings in your MUA however you do that
(gnus-posting-styles for me) so that each newsgroup/list has a
return address of [EMAIL PROTECTED]
- Create filtering settings so that mail addressed to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] gets moved to whatever folders you want
it in
What it does:
-------------
When someone from a usenet group/mailing list replies to your e-mail,
the address they reply to is [EMAIL PROTECTED] The
.qmail-default file in ~usenet takes the e-mail, checks for a
reference to an e-mail which you wrote (via the Message-ID), and if it
appears to have existed, it will forward the message locally to your
real account. I have used the format "me-$LOCAL" so you can do other
stuff with it if you like (like make a ~me/.qmail-ezmlm to deliver to
some other address...I dunno why, but hey its flexible).
If an address harvester has sliced your address to [EMAIL PROTECTED],
then it will be bounced. Even if they try sending an e-mail to
[EMAIL PROTECTED], it will bounce since they more than likely
won't be referencing an ID of an e-mail you have posted (no
guarantees, they could get smart, but we'll always be smarter :)
What NOT to do:
---------------
Do NOT subscribe to ANY lists with the e-mail address
usenet*@domain.com. If you do, you will become unpopular VERY fast I
can promise you. Subscribe with your real address, but just set your
mailing address from then on to your new usenet one.
BTW, it is now 4.50am. I am likely to have made a mistake somewhere
above. Please let me know if I have since I don't want to destroy
anyone's e-mail systems!
Ciao
Brett.
--
C:\DOS C:\DOS\RUN RUN\DOS\RUN
C:\WINDOWS C:\WINDOWS\GO C:\PC\CRAWL
