Paul O Bartlett <pobart(_at_)access(_dot_)digex(_dot_)net> writes:
can scan and purge in a few seconds. My point is that on rare
occasions I *have* received legitimate email matching my "spam"
recipes, so if I just discarded all such matches, I would have lost
Yup. For instance, any mail containing a "recipe to match spam" will most
probably be flagged as spam itself since (by definition) it contains all the
usual spam keywords (kind of like the infamous "ps | grep" problem).
One thing is: it's really bad practice to drop mail into /dev/null. It's much
better to return an error (this way, if it actually was a legitimate mail, the
poor victim at least knows that the mail didn't get through).
Also I discovered recently that some address-extraction programs seem to match
addresses of the form [-a-zA-Z0-9(_dot_)]*(_at_)[-a-zA-Z0-9(_dot_)]*(_dot_) In
other words, the "+"
in my address doesn't match. I realized this because I recently changed my
email setup so that mail to unknown users is sent to a specific address rather
than merely refused. so I received email directed to
<comp(_dot_)compilers(_at_)tequila(_dot_)cs(_dot_)yale(_dot_)edu> (whereas the
actual address I used was
preceded by "monnier+").
Stefan