At 15:21 08-07-98 -0700, Cliff Emberg wrote:
At 05:26 PM 7/8/98 +0200, you wrote:
- Jacques Gauthier <jacques_g(_at_)yahoo(_dot_)com>:
| if sender is the same as the receiver then it's spam
Might work for you, but it is also a technique for "personal" mailing lists
- say your good buddy is sending out jokes to all his friends (not on a
real listserv, but through his regular ISP account), and being the good
netizen, doesn't want to cleartext every recipient's address in the To: or
Cc: fields, so he Bcc's everybody, and lists himself as the To: (I think
some mail clients have this as a requirement). Better that than NO To: at
all (which I generally consider SPAM).
I discourage the self-to stuff, but at the same time, I *REALLY* discourage
people from sending MY address to others who I generally don't know (esp
those less-than-experienced neighbours that decide they need to forward
some chainletter they got or some political action bulletin to EVERYBODY
they know, and half those morons will forward what they got, HEADERS AND
ALL to everybody they know, and before you know it, confused people are
sending YOU inquiries). I live one of those "charmed" lives.
If you filter certain known addresses BEFORE spam (nothing like explaining
to a family member that all those damn exclamation marks in their last
message caused their message to get thrown out), you might be able to avoid
this by for the most part.
I don't think I have ever seen spam with this characteristic.
OTOH, I frequently make notes by sending mail to myself.
If your system supports plussed addresses, try:
username+Reminders(_at_)domain
I have my POP mail client set up to automatically flag such reminder
messages as UNREAD (so that if I send it while at the office, and thus
subsequently download it which marks it as read on the server, when I get
home, it'll be downloaded (and deleted) from the server, but marked as NEW
again so I actually take note of the REMINDER). At the same time, it
conveniently
Probably 35-40% of the spam that hits here has the receivers
address in the from field. We finally put in a simple sendmail
Sendmail (8.8.5 for sure) can be configured to automatically insert a From:
address where one doesn't exist. Really intended for ensuring that
OUTBOUND messages have them, but I believe this can cause incoming messages
to automatically get the recipients address inserted on them. It is a
cause for freaking out when you receive a spam clearly addressed to several
other folks, and the damn thing has YOUR address on the From:.
Then, this may very well be caused by fetchmail retrieving messages from a
remote box (I do this to grab mail on some other incidental accounts and
process them through a single spam filter on my server), and injecting them
into the local mail system (without a From, so sendmail adds it).
Actually, come to think of it, this is probably what I've seen.
---
Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies. I'll get my copy from the list.
Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering
Post Box 2395 / San Rafael, CA 94912-2395