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

[don warner saklad]

Currently I use...
Esc C-s Regexp to summarize by:
and filter out strings, for example...
watches
pill
meds


On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 12:58 PM, Ben Okopnik <ben at linuxgazette.net> wrote:
> 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 *
>