getting rid of yucky emails

[Janina Sajka]

Hi, Cheryl:

You are so right. They're killing off our email, and it's a sad thing,
too.

Here's my best cut at an answer ...

Definitely use spam assassin. In fact, push the threshold score down to
5. With a proper procmail recipie, you can have messages that meet or
exceed this score automatically moved to a "spam" folder and marked for
deletion. Why? So you can look in that folder to see if you're getting
many false positives. Obviously you wouldn't want many, but you might
accept some.

There's also a good recipie for dumping duplicate emails. I'm attaching
several of my .procmail recipies for the good of the order.

Lastly, take some of the more offending and common terms into a procmail
kill file. Do you really expect to hear about viagra or perscriptions
from your friends? I don't. So, anything with the word goes straight to
/dev/null.

I have found this helps a lot and I'm willing to lose a genuine message
or two to kill spam by the hundred.


So, herewith some examples.

Cheryl Homiak writes:
> From: Cheryl Homiak <chomiak at chartermi.net>
> 
> Can anybody tell me if there's a way to get rid of these stupid emails
> about viagra, sex, how to get drugs online without a prescription, and
> other horrible and/or stupid stuff. I know there's spamassassin, but since
> the emails come with different subject headings, often innocent or
> important-looking ones, and they're always purportedly from different
> people, I don't know how to get rid of them. I never knowingly did
> anything to solicit such stuff, and email used to be a complete pleasure,
> but sometime this summer this kind of junk started becoming prevalent. Of
> course, I usually can avoid reading it; if it tells me to pick up my order
> for instance and i don't have an order to be picked up I delete it, and if
> it's supposedly to me but the index in pine doesn't give a name or email I
> know I delete it. but really, I don't even want the stuff coming here.
> Thanks for any suggestions. I'm really frustrated!!!
> 
> 
> -- 
> Cheryl
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup

-- 
	
Janina Sajka
Email: janina at rednote.net		
Phone: +1 (202) 408-8175

Director, Technology Research and Development
American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)
http://www.afb.org

Chair, Accessibility Work Group
Free Standards Group
http://a11y.org
-------------- next part --------------
#Set on when debugging
VERBOSE=off
#Directory for storing procmail log and rc files
PMDIR=$HOME/mail/.procmail
LOGFILE=$PMDIR/log
#     INCLUDERC=$PMDIR/rc.test
#Remove Duplicate Incoming Messages

              :0 Wh: msgid.lock
              | formail -D 8192 msgid.cache
#send fetched mail through spamassassin
#   :0fw
#   | spamassassin -P
#   :0e
#   EXITCODE==$?
#Send spam to the spam mbox
#   :0:
#   * ^X-Spam-Flag: YES
#   $HOME/mail/spam
#
#     INCLUDERC=$PMDIR/rc.afb
INCLUDERC=$PMDIR/rc.lists
INCLUDERC=$PMDIR/rc.kills
INCLUDERC=$PMDIR/rc.playsound
-------------- next part --------------

     :0: #Pipe to /dev/null
     * ^From:.*mariamabacha
/dev/null

     :0: #Pipe to /dev/null
     * ^Subject:.*crap
/dev/null

     :0: #Pipe to /dev/null
     * ^Subject:.*Latest Microsoft
/dev/null

     :0: #Pipe to /dev/null
     * ^Subject:.*porn
/dev/null

     :0: #Pipe to /dev/null
     * ^Subject:.*viagra
/dev/null

     :0: #Pipe to /dev/null
     * ^Subject:.*Janina
/dev/null

     :0: #Pipe to /dev/null
     * ^Subject:.*sex
/dev/null

     :0: #Pipe to /dev/null
     * ^Subject:.*casino
/dev/null

     :0: #Pipe to /dev/null
     * ^Subject:.*webcam
/dev/null