I was having a tidy-up of my Debian install last night and trying to sort out some sort of spam filtering.
To access mail I simply use Sylpheed as a straight dial-up POP3 client. I don't use procmail, sendmail or any sort of MTA (or at least I don't think I do :o) ).
So I did a apropos search on 'mail' and came up with a long list of things that had been installed as part of the base install.
Given they way I access my email can I uninstall things like procmail, sendmail, and various MTAs? or is this likely to break something else?
I'm thinking of using 'mailfilter' (mainly because it can act as a POP3 client) to scan the mail headers on the ISP server and delete any spam before I download it.
Given my setup, are there any alternatives I should also look at?
As part of setting up mailfilter I need to set up a set of regex entries to identify possible spam. I'm reasonably happy with regex itself but if anyone has some anti-spam regexs I can crib I would be most grateful :o)
What would be nice would be to use some of the DNS blacklist servers e.g. spamcop, ordb, etc., in some way, can I do this with this sort of configuration without actually downloading the headers 1st?
Keith
Keith Watson Keith.Watson@Kewill.com wrote:
Given they way I access my email can I uninstall things like procmail, sendmail, and various MTAs? or is this likely to break something else?
Probably. If you remove sendmail, you may find that some local processes are broken until you install another MTA. nullmailer and ssmtp are both small ones that just forward to a remote host.
I'm thinking of using 'mailfilter' (mainly because it can act as a POP3 client) to scan the mail headers on the ISP server and delete any spam before I download it.
Yes, I've used that in the past. I think it can use the DNS blacklists to delete spam. Remember, there is a relatively high chance of rejecting non-spam without ever knowing if you use DNS blacklisting. Also, you should whitelist mailing lists, as you will probably be removed if you send a "Hi! I just rejected your email!" message to a listserver.
From: MJ Ray
Keith Watson Keith.Watson@Kewill.com wrote:
Given they way I access my email can I uninstall things like procmail, sendmail, and various MTAs? or is this likely to break something else?
Probably. If you remove sendmail, you may find that some local processes are broken until you install another MTA. nullmailer and ssmtp are both small ones that just forward to a remote host.
Thought that might be the case. :(
I'm thinking of using 'mailfilter' (mainly because it can act as a POP3 client) to scan the mail headers on the ISP server and delete any spam before I download it.
Yes, I've used that in the past. I think it can use the DNS blacklists to delete spam. Remember, there is a relatively high chance of rejecting non-spam without ever knowing if you use DNS blacklisting. Also, you
There's nothing in the FAQ about using DNS blacklists, but I've posted to the mailfiter list to see if anyone has got it to use blacklists.
should whitelist mailing lists, as you will probably be removed if you send a "Hi! I just rejected your email!" message to a listserver.
Not problem with mailfilter as it only deletes not bounces emails.
However the Sylpheed-claws site mentions a SpamAssassin plugin, so I'm going to take a look at that as well.
Thanks for the feedback,
Keith
On Fri, Jun 06, 2003 at 11:49:21AM +0100, Keith Watson wrote:
So I did a apropos search on 'mail' and came up with a long list of things that had been installed as part of the base install.
apropos isn't the best way to find out what is related to mail that is installed on the system. Also when you see it having a manpage for 'sendmail' it is most likely a man page for exim (the default debian smtp program)
I wouldn't worry about having a few unused (or what you think are unused) packages installed, unless you are really tight on diskspace. also dpkg -l will give a better overview of which packages are installed on your system.
As for anti-spam, I use currently use fetchmail to get my mail, which then passess mail onto exim for delivery which in turn looks in a procmail script which calls spamassassin. Anyhow I think you would have better success identifing spam by downloading it and feeding it through something like spamassassin with learning enabled. Of course this doesn't save you from having to download the spam in the first place but I would have thought filtering on headers would be quite difficult as many of the spams i get now have very sensible subjects lines and look very valid.
Adam
Keith Watson Keith.Watson@Kewill.com wrote:
There's nothing in the FAQ about using DNS blacklists, but I've posted to the mailfiter list to see if anyone has got it to use blacklists.
My bad. I was using "disspam" for that at the time.
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Adam Bower -
Keith Watson -
MJ Ray