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Re: Sorting by email addresses

2005-10-09 16:13:19
At 18:28 2005-10-09 -0400, Lord Raiden wrote:
        Ok, so if I can sort by individual users using fetchmail, that
simplify's one part of what I need to do.  So let's move on to the
second.  Let's say some email address you have is a dummy address.  You for
example go to MegaBucks Visa inc and give them the email address
"megabucks(_at_)raiden(_dot_)net".  Then good old megabucks sells your address 
to 3000
spammers.  I now want to shut down that address using procmail.

Well, if you're getting your email from someone elses' mailserver (via 
fetchmail), you're going to be DOWNLOADING that message regardless.  It's 
easy enough to scan the headers of your message looking for any occurrence 
of "megabucks(_at_)raiden(_dot_)net":

:0:
* megabucks(_at_)raiden\(_dot_)net
spew.mbx

(or you could use the ^TO macro)

I have an effective solution though: use an expiring subdomain.  This is 
easy if you have DNS and email control over your domain.  Of course, you're 
using someone ELSE for your MX, so there's a need to arrange with someone 
else to make the changes to the mail config to handle subdomains.  For 
those of us who manage our own servers and routed networks, this is all 
quite easy to do.

Create an MX record for "something.raiden.net" where something is a token 
you switch out every 6-12 months or so (I use one for 6 months, but 
maintain it in DNS and sendmail config for 12).  The idea is that when you 
remove the record from DNS, the HOST doesn't resolve, and therefore 
spammers have nowhere to even _connect_ to in order to send you spam.  OR, 
you can maintain the host and simply redirect it to some corporate spammer 
and let THEM refuse your spam for you. <g>

This means the host that accepts mail on your behalf won't get mail 
intended for OLD "temporary" contact addresses.  You'd use a temporary 
contact address for anyone who you'd suspect would compromise your address.

After you review SMTP logs and see just how many bogus connections there 
are to a server, the prospect of _shedding_ those entirely - not even 
having to do DNSBL lookups and the like - is really attractive.


Of course, as his Kremeiness has pointed out, it would seem as if your ISP 
is probably using a wildcard delivery for your account and *ANY* apparent 
recipient at your domain will deliver to your account.  That's bad - you 
want an ISP which will permit you to set the aliases you accept mail for 
(even if they all deliver to one MBX).

Alternatley, if you want to tinker with dynamic DNS (or perhaps you have a 
fixed IP)?  You should look at setting up your ISP as a *BACKUP* mail 
server (a higher MX value), and your own server as the primary, then rather 
than using fetchmail to access a POP or IMAP mailbox, you'd use fetchmail 
to issue an ETRN to tell your ISP mail server to attempt to deliver any 
mail it has queued for your domain.  See the SMTP RFC and the documentation 
for fetchmail.

Pretty much all the issues you've raised are MTA issues and not things 
you'd effectively tackle using procmail.

---
  Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering

  Procmail disclaimer: <http://www.professional.org/procmail/disclaimer.html>
  Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies.  I'll get my copy from the list.


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