On Tue, 7 Jan 1997, Philip Guenther wrote:
Okay, that raises the question of when the To: field could be empty.
I know of one legitimate case: when you're the 'target' of a Bcc.
Treating Bcc's as "junk" scares me, as while I've received few Bcc's,
all of them have been important and relatively time critical.
The second recipe above ("!^TOmymachine") makes the assumption that
you've already dealt with any mailing lists you're on, as mailing lists
in general don't put your address in the header (only in the
envelope). If you haven't, then almost all of the messages you receive
from said unhandled lists will be dropped in the "junk" folder.
I'm not trying to rain on your spam catching parade, but it's really
easy to be too strict and start dropping mail you want in the bit
bucket.
I agree with you on this. I used to use some severe filtering, and tossed
everything caught into /dev/null. Until I noticed some things I wanted
were matching my spam filters.. :(
I think when planning your filters to deal with spam, you need to consider
two things:
1) A thorough review of what might come under the definition of "mail I
might be interested in", and how to test for this.
2) A concise definition of what you consider to be spam. Which includes
the methods you plan to use to use to keep mail defined in #1.
For myself, I sort all mailing lists into their folders, Everything
FROM_MAILER and to me, and requests from my fileserver. Then I test if
they are on my "welcome list". If not, then I test for "bozoness".
I spent a lot of time determining how to do this, and it works better than
i ever expected.
Do you really receive so much spam that you've actually saved
time by putting these recipes in?
Yes.
I think it depends in part on how much you post to usenet. Not only do I
post a lot, but i also like to engage in some of the more interesting
flame fests at times. And I find that a procmail does an excellant job of
weeding the resulting spam out, as well as the garbage that the more
idiotic on the net try to send (i.e mailbombings, hate mail, forged
postings to alt.test). Not only do I save time, I don't get the
aggravation you feel at someone wasting your time with this nonsense.
--
Williams and Holland's Law:
If enough data is collected, anything may be proven by
statistical methods.