dattier(_at_)wwa(_dot_)com (David W. Tamkin) wrote:
But it still baffles me how my attempt to write to him
got another rejection despite my using his bypass word, yet Catherine's made
it through. I guess that he already had Catherine on his whitelist of known
senders but his subject line tests didn't work.
She was not on my nobounce list. The difference might be presence of the
body text trigger phrase.
[see below] ...so a mistake on a whitelist sent a nasty-
gram to a non-spammer.
Not exactly. SpamBouncer does *not* bounce all messages that don't appear
on the whitelists. The mailing list whitelist comes first, and in my case
also serves the function of correctly routing listmail to one of several
recipients who use the two virtual domains mapped to this account. Then the
spam.rc script begins with:
|:1 hf
|? fgrep -i -f $HOME/nobounce
|| $FORMAIL -A"X-SpamBouncer: Pass" -A"X-SpamRule: NoBounce"
|
|# Start of "else" wrapper so NoBounce matches skip everything else in spam.rc
|:0 E
|{
|
|# CHECK FOR PASSWORD
|...
So it was the combination of three events which caused SpamBounce of
procmail-d:
1) My mistaken insertion of procmail@ vice procmail-d@ in the mailing list
whitelist
2) The failure of ^FROM_DAEMON to match (still no idea why this happened)
3) The presence of a typical spam phrase under discussion in the body of
that day's procmail digest.
See, there it is again: the bypass word in his rejection message didn't match
the bypass word in his .procmailrc, ... [remainder of sentence moved above]
I'm also baffled about why this did not match. Here are:
my .procmailrc setting of the password
|BYPASSWD=bypfilter
spam.rc's recipe for insertion of the password
| echo " ********** The password is ${BYPASSWD}. **********";\
the relevant line from my bounce message
| ********** The password is bypfilter. **********
your subject line
|Subject: your bypfilter bypped
the recipe in spam.rc
|# CHECK FOR PASSWORD
|:0:
|* $ ^Subject:.*${BYPASSWD}
|| $FORMAIL -A"X-SpamBouncer: Default" -A"X-SpamRule: BYPASSWD" >>$DEFAULT
I cannot see why that recipe would not correctly trigger on your subject
line.
Wotan <wotan(_at_)netcom(_dot_)com> wrote:
Auto-bouncing mail from the unknown is never a good idea.
For clarity: neither SpamBouncer nor my wrapper recipies do this on mail
that is merely "unknown".
Auto-bouncing mailing lists is an even worse idea.
Agreed--that was only due to my mistake with procmail[-d]@
If something qualifies as spam in your mail filters, /dev/null it.
For unambiguous spam, that makes sense (though it may be appropriate to
direct requests for list removal to the appropriate address). But in the
case of *probable* spam (body text phrase or badly abused domains) it does
make sense to bounce with a bypass filter, as SpamBouncer and many other
scripts here do.
An improvement might be to limit the bounce to only the first ~20 lines of
body text, to avoid expanding mail loops and huge bounces.