Hi all,
I recently started using TMDA, and I wanted to share my initial
experience, in the hope that I can use it more effectively in the
future.
I'm pleased with TMDA overall, but the fact is that using a whitelist
requires continuous attention to avoid missing important messages.
A couple of times a day, I do the following:
cd ~/.tmda
grep From logs/incoming
and scan the output.
- A single name means the message got through fine.
- A name appearing five times in a row means someone quickly confirmed
their validity and the message got through.
- A name appearing twice means the message got put in the pending list.
If it doesn't appear again, then it was either spam or an important
message that I would have missed.
If it appears again in a set of three, then it means they eventually
confirmed their identity and the message got through.
Two main headaches are:
1) Sending a message to someone who is probably not on your white list.
2) Even worse is filling out a web form for a conference, or subscribing
to a new list. There is always an automatic response and sometimes
a request for confirmation, but you can't predict what the sending
address will be.
A solution for headache #1 is to check your whitelist before sending the
message and, if necessary, add their address. This is not a perfect
solution, because their address might be [EMAIL PROTECTED] but then they reply
from [EMAIL PROTECTED] and are forced to confirm their identity.
This is not terrible, of course, but I think it's kind of rude.
Another solution, which works for both problems is to add the line
from [EMAIL PROTECTED] ok
(or the corresponding domain name for the expected automated response)
to your ~/.tmda/filters/incoming file.
This works well for individuals, but the automated responses can fool you
by coming from a completely different domain. Also, you then open the
door to spams that are spoofing that domain. To prevent this, you have to
wait and see what the actual valid address is, then add it to your
whitelist, and finally remove the "ok" line from your filters/incoming
file.
Quite a pain.
Another possibility would be to turn TMDA off (i.e. move ~/.procmailrc
aside) while waiting for automated responses, as they usually come very
quickly.
Imagine you send a message to someone else using TMDA, when you're not on
their whitelist and they're not on yours. Neither can confirm their
identity. Would an infinite sequence of confirmation requests be
launched?
If you do miss an important automated response or if somebody important
refuses to go through the confirmation process, you can grep for them:
cd ~/.tmda
grep "Important Name" pending/*.msg
Then, when you see that their message is in the file pending/1234.789.msg
you can copy this file to ~/mail and pine will treat it as a mail
folder containing a single message. You can then forward the message to
yourself with a meaningful subject line and then save it into a meaningful
mail folder.
For this rather tedious and time-consuming approach to work, you must
routinely do something like the following:
cd ~/.tmda
rm logs/incoming
touch logs/incoming
so that the logs/incoming file doesn't get too long for human eyes to
parse quickly. Sigh...
I should note that I'm only applying TMDA to incoming messages. I'm not
using any of its features for outgoing email.
Any thoughts or suggestions on how I could use TMDA more effectively, with
less daily attention, would be very welcome.
Thanks in advance,
David
--
David Bruhwiler -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 303.448.0732
Tech-X Corp., 5621 Arapahoe Ave, Suite A, Boulder CO 80303
http://www.txcorp.com -- fax: 303.448.7756
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