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Re: help for a newbie

2004-11-29 12:42:45
On Mon, Nov 29, 2004 at 05:22:39PM +0100, Dallman Ross wrote:

My point really was simply that adding more precision to the matching --
such as with a "-w" option to grep -- costs nothing and saves you the
potential nastiness of finding some spammer in your inbox without your
knowing how that happened.

It doesn't matter, really, if you're the only one on your system.
If you get a lot of spam, sooner or later someone is going to write
with a fake From-address that will cause a match if you're sloppy
about your method for accepting matches.  Look: suppose your buddy
is "bert(_at_)hotmail(_dot_)com".  (I just made that up, but I'm sure that
belongs to somebody; don't bug the poor sod!) :-)  So you put that
in your whitelist.  Now suppose a few months go by and some spammer
writes you -- 'From: "Ima Spammer" <hubert(_at_)hotmail(_dot_)com>'.  Guess 
what?
He's in.  But not with the -w option!  The downside is nil.  Even
if it doesn't happen often, when it does, you will spend hours
trying to figure out what went wrong.  But there's no need to put
yourself in that predicament in the first place!  Just do the
algorithm nice 'n' tight the first time.  (Believe me, I've been
there and had to waste half-a-day figuring out what hole I neglected
to plug nine months earlier, and it was not only stupid, but a
total waste of my time.)

One further question.
I can decipher the first and second lines, but where does the email end up 
after it's checked against the .alias/white list?

Wherever you have presumably preset $WHITE to be.

  WHITE = /some/place/for/my/friends/to/be

  :0:
  * conditions
  $WHITE


Thanks for the further explaination. A previous poster, Troy, I think had, 
suggested I try that, but I was unsure.
thanks again for the pointers
 
And yes I have looked thru the email archive, maybe I just need some advice 
as to what to search for.

I just did a search on "whitelist grep" and found lots of interesting
stuff, one of which more or less selected at random being:
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/procmail/2004-06/msg00096.html

You might also might want to read what Nancy McGough has to say about
white-/blue-/greenlisting on her Procmail Quick-Start pages (linked
from the www.procmail.org pages as well, somewhere down near where the
searchable archives are to be found).

-- 
dman
I've been to her site, seems her explanations with regard to white, blue 
and the other colors are dealing with spamassasin.
I'll have some looking thru the archives
Thanks
jerry


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