John,
You need a mailer or newsreader that allows you to add extra header lines
to your email. I do not know of any mailers that can do this, except
clumbsily (Pine comes to mind). But I do know of some newsreaders that can
do this. Under Unix, the tin newsreader allows you to add extra headers as
you compose the message. Remember to mail the message, not post it! The
drawback is that you may be logged on to your Unix shell account when the
mail is sent. If you are on NSF, There is no guarantee that Procmail
executes on the same machine as when you are logged off! NSF is weird.
You can also use SLIP/PPP newsreaders such as YA-Newswatcher on the
Macintosh. It allows you to add extra news header and extra mail header
lines, althought it is clumbsy. And you are not logged on to your Unix
shell account when you send the mail! I suspect similar newsreaders are
available for Windows. I use YA-Newswatcher to test unusual Procmail
recipes that trigger off obscure header lines, stuff like:
Message-ID: <>
X-Advertisement:
Comments: Authenticated Sender
Received: answerme.com
Received: spica.net
Received: regulus.net
Stuff that is a hallmark of stupid, illiterate spammers. Have a nice day.
BTW: It appears that over 80 percent of my incoming email is spam.
Procmail deletes almost all of it. At least since Spamford went out of
business. Can you imagine that only 20 percent of my email is legitimate?
And it is much worse at work, where I have to depend on cc:Mail. The
cc:Mail filters are quite laughable. They do not allow you to filter on
the domain names in the From: header. And you can't filter at all on the
Received: headers.
Felix Tilley
============================================================================
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Date: Mon, 3 Nov 1997 10:58:29 -0800 (PST)
From: John Gianni <jjg(_at_)Cadence(_dot_)COM>
To: procmail(_at_)Informatik(_dot_)RWTH-Aachen(_dot_)DE
Subject: Re: Best anti-spam-filter tests?
Message-Id: <199711031858(_dot_)KAA02020(_at_)cds9200(_dot_)Cadence(_dot_)COM>
_increase_ the amount of spam received!)
I simply asked if you knew better ways to "manufacture" spam tests to
send to _myself_ so I could test _my_ filters.
I proposed, essentially, two methods that currently work:
a) Creating a test file (header & body); then, sending it to myself
(using formail & procmail) to test if my filter catches the test.
b) Creating a new message, header & body, thru interactive commands
to sendmaili, to test if my filter catches the test.
All I asked was, more directly:
Q: Are there better ways to create and send test mail to myself that
appear to come from a variety of other places and contain a variety
of email headers that I can change at will to test my filters.