[TAG] For users of RMAIL in Emacs, how do you deal with spam messages?...

[Ben Okopnik]

On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 08:51:32AM -0400, don warner saklad wrote:
> For users of RMAIL in Emacs, how do you deal with spam messages?...

I would think that it would be the same as everyone else. Whatever
client you choose to use is irrelevant - spam filtering happens before
that stage.

The email chain looks like this, assuming a typical end-user to end-user
interaction and POP:

1. User1 composes and sends a message to User2, which is handled by
User1's SMTP host.

2. That SMTP host contacts User2's SMTP host and transfers the mail
there, where it's stored for retrieval.

3. User2 retrieves the mail from that host via POP, processes it, and 
stores it in a local mbox, where it's available for reading.

Obviously, if User1 is a spammer, there's no hope of doing anything at
stage 1; both the outgoing email client and the SMTP server are going to
be under his control. Stage 2, however, gives us a pretty good
opportunity: we can use SPF (Sender Policy Framework) or other, similar
tools to do SMTP-time spam rejection - possibly one of the most
effective tools in the arsenal. This, however, requires a cooperative
system administrator - and that's not always the case. At that point, we
have to deal with everything at stage 3 - which involves filtering such
as Spamassassin, etc. On the one hand, this places the burden of
filtering on the user and requires him to be well-educated about spam,
etc.; on the other hand, it allows for precise custom configuration.

If 'procmail' is installed on your system, the easiest approach would be
to configure it (via your ~/.procmailrc) to handle spam - or, better
yet, send it to the latest generation of anti-spam software for further
processing. I wrote an article about that a while back:
http://linuxgazette.net/issue62/okopnik.html

> Not all messages appear with SpamAssassin headers.

Perhaps some of your upstream hosts don't use SA, while some others do.


-- 
* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *