On Sep 23, 10:43am, Wotan wrote:
Subject: Re: Overzealous auto-responding?
Over the past six months, a significant number of individuals have begun
forwarding multiple copies of every spam message they receive to the IRS
and other federal agencies. Frequently, these messages are transmitted via
procmail filters and are not being screened by the recipient.
[snip]
This situation was further exasperated recently where a programming glitch
in an automated mail filter caused what effectively was an email bomb
attack on the IRS. The individual responsible could have faced federal
criminal charges for their negligence.
IMHO, anyone idiot enough to auto-forward messages to any official should
be charged. It is irresponsible to randomly autoforward messages.
The most any filter for non-specific addresses should do is either bounce
or delete mail. Unless the filter is something testing for the classic
Dave Rhodes Pyramid scheme, it is unlikely any filter is going to detect
potential tax fraud in an email.
Hi,
My procmail filters don't autoforward to the authorities, but I also
don't route stuff to dev/null. I put it in folders that I check once a week.
Autoforwarding is excessive.
This does raise a question though. If someone had a spam recipe rout
everything to a spam folder, and then went through the folder and determined
which ones should be forwarded to the authorities (FTC, IRS, FCC, Disney), it
would be nice if there was a script that would automatically take ones
remaining in the folder (or moved to that folder) and sent them to the proper
authorities when it was run.
I would think that it would be trivial for a someone who isn't Unix
illiterate like me to do this with formail. Has anyone done it?
--
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Matthew Saroff
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