On Thu, 11 Mar 1999 19:12:29 -0800, michael(_at_)trollope(_dot_)org wrote:
I suggest you don't reply.
Strictly speaking I am sending a complaint to the provider, since the
outfit in question can be found via DNS lookup. It's not your
run-of-the-mill relay spammer. `technicalplacement.com' is the name
of the "company."
I have sent email directly to their `postmaster' complaining, but I go
no response.
Once I have my bounce mechanism in place, I don't care how many slices
of spam they send, since they'll be getting them all back into their
own mailboxes. And without my having to look at them.
Perhaps you should find their upstream provider instead and complain
to them. Groping around in whois left as an exercise; get in touch in
private if you think you need help with this.
Perhaps you should nominate them for the RBL. <http://maps.vix.com/rbl/>
Having said that, autocomplaining can be an effective tool, but you
should use it sparingly. In other words, if it doesn't seem to have
the desired effect in a relatively short time, you are probably better
off routing their messages to /dev/null (or to a spare partition you
can bring up as evidence when you sue them) or firewalling them off
completely (and have your buddies do the same ... The RBL is of course
the ultimate vehicle for this).
Are their messages sent as Precedence: junk or something? Because if
they're not, you might simply refuse them with a proper EXITCODE and
the sender will get a bounce message. This I should think will bring
the message across just as well, or perhaps even better.
There is a good recipe by David Tamkin for generating a reply message
which contains the headers of the message you're responding to [1],
but since you only asked about returning their message with a note
attached to the beginning of the body, here's one way of doing that:
:0
* conditions for VERY UNAMBIGUOUSLY identifying their messages
{
# Backslashitis required by sed
Message="
I have a message for all you cute people out there. Maybe\\
you're cute, maybe you're beautiful ... etc etc etc\\
"
:0fbw
| sed -e "1i\\$Message"
:0
! postmaster(_at_)bozo-domain(_dot_)net
}
Keeping the actual message in a variable is sort of a kludge around
the contortions you have to go through in order to pass in a
multi-line string in the action line itself. (Boo, hiss.) It would
look a little bit less kludgy if you used single quotes when you
declare the variable (because then the backslashes wouldn't have to be
doubled) but then you can't easily include words which contain
apostrophes [aka single quotes, in this sadly ASCII world]. (If you're
writing in something else than English, that's a lesser problem.)
I might be putting my foot in my mouth here with this sed kludgery,
I'm too lazy to explore other ways to possibly do this more elegantly
with only one external process.
/* era */
[1] Plug time: Pointers to David's mystical recipe are at e.g.
<http://www.iki.fi/era/procmail/links.html#copy-header> ... if you use
a browser which doesn't follow the #copy-header part correctly, search
for "pearl" on the page.
--
.obBotBait: It shouldn't even matter whether <http://www.iki.fi/~era/>
I am a resident of the state of Washington. <http://members.xoom.com/procmail/>