procmail
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reverse the spam rules

2003-10-30 10:23:23

I am seeing a lot of email about how to trap spam email.  I am using
procmail in the reverse: consider everything spam and only trap what I
want.  I am curious to get other folks opinion of this solution.  I
have only started doing this in the last week or so, but it seems to be
working very well.  I have had only a handful of the 100s of daily spam
messages I get actually get through to my inbox.

What I do is at the top of my procmail recipes I use formail to add a
header to any email that I want to keep:

:0 f
*$ ^From:.*\cbot.com
| formail -a "X-Keeplist-Member:Procmail has allowed this message through."

[I have about 30 of these sorts of rules, and they are growing]

Then the last line of my procmail recipes is

:0
* ! ^X-Keeplist-Member:Procmail has allowed this message through.
garbage/.

So anything that I do not explicitly want to keep is thrown out.  It is
put in a folder named "garbage" so that I can search through it for
false positives.  If I find something that I want to read, I do so.  If
it is a recurring message that I will want to be delivered normally the
next time it is sent, I add another X-Keeplist-Member rule for it.

Am I missing some fatal flaw that is going to bite me in the butt at
some point in the future, or have I successfully nuked 99% of the spam
that comes my way?

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Christopher L. Barnard         O     When I was a boy I was told that |
| cbarnard(_at_)tsg(_dot_)cbot(_dot_)com         / \    anybody could become 
president.  |
| (312) 347-4901               O---O   Now I'm beginning to believe it. |
| http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/~cbarnard                --Clarence Darrow |
+----------PGP public key available via finger or PGP keyserver---------+

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