Slashdot Mirror

I can't stand web-based mail readers, so, yes, I do use a PC email client, and I think many others do for the same reason.
Furthermore, I couldn't stand to have to actively check for new email, so for me it's:

1. postfix with sender-dependent relay hosts and -authentication
2. fetchmail to periodically poll all email addresses i have for new mail, handing it the local postfix for delivery, which then "delivers" it to
3. procmail in order to sort the incoming mail into various maildirs, triggering
4. a script that watches ~/.maildir/new for new files, and if positive, puts a 'new mail' label into my WM's status bar, which causes me to fire up
5. mutt to read the mail. it doesn't even need to be compiled with IMAP/POP3 support this way, which is neat.

It's virtually impossible to replicate the functionality and ease-of-use of gmail. However, I've recently looked into this, and here are my comments (note: I haven't yet implemented any of this, so take this with a large boulder of salt):

* For obvious reasons, you need an IMAP server. Dovecot is among the most compliant and best (my ISP happens to use it :-). Should you want to choose something else, make sure you check out the IMAP server compliancy page.

* For push email on the iPhone, z-push seems to work, and people have gotten it to work with dovecot (note: this is a bit old, and so these instructions might need some tweaking).

* You do, of course need an MTA like postfix or exim, but choosing one may be a matter of personal preference.

* You're unlikely to find a spam filtering solution as good as gmail's (it's crowd-sourced, after all).

* Finding a replacement for gmail filtering rules is a big problem. You'll probably have to go with procmail.

(However, as a programmer, I happen to prefer something with a bit more power and flexibilty, and so I'd probably port over the ancient-but-likely-still-usable "deliver" mail handling program. Deliver takes mail received from postfix, exim, or sendmail and feeds it to a program that you write (a shell script, ruby script, C++ program, or whatever you like). Your program then tells deliver what to do with the message (deliver it normally, refile it, delete it, etc., etc.). Also, since it's a program, you can do behind-the-scenes stuff like saving of attachments, vacation autoreplies, mail archiving, etc., etc.. It's the ultimate in power in flexibility, if you can program.)

However, this still doesn't address the issues of contacts and calendars. Unfortunately, there's no good solution for these:

* You might want to check out Zarafa. The free community version seems decent, as long as you're happy with access via the web or iPhone. Mail filtering capabilities are limited, and you'll have to use Outlook if you want to use a desktop client for contacts or calendars (the free version limits you to three Outlook users). However, Thunderbird might be usable via CalDAV for calendars and z-sync for contacts.

* As others have mentioned, Zimbra is a possibility. However, if you need iPhone support, it appears to be horribly expensive for home use -- as in multiple hundreds of dollars expensive. From that I understand, the Zimbra network edition, starter version is the cheapest iPhone-supporting deal, at ~$400/year or $840 for a perpetual license.

+1 on the database. If you can get the data into some sort of mail server temporarily, you can use procmail to parse the mail headers and generate SQL insertions. There's probably something newer - I used this method in 1998 to parse incoming mail from a remote server, that sent status updates every hour.

Mail headers are not that difficult, so if you can get the data into a few standard formats (I don't know about the Outlook formats), you could even do this with a scripting language of your choice, directly from the file. Procmail is nice because it's very good about splitting the mail at the correct points. But, like I said, there's probably newer tools.

In the database you only need fields for (off the top of my head) Date Sent, Date Delivered, To, From, Subject, All Headers, Body and Attachments, plus probably one separate table for the raw data with the same indices so you can augment it later with stuff like mail ID and threading, etc. Then run a Full Text index on the body and subject. You could get fancy with separate tables for all the different To and From, etc.

In the very early 1990s I built and sold a tool for the NeXT called MailQuery, which combined NeXTMail with a 'context aware full text semantic search engine' called Metamorph - presently part of the Texis text search system. That was cool. It was phenomenally good at letting you type in key words that were related to what you were looking for, and finding exactly the right email. You didn't have to remember the exact words - just the ideas, more or less.

Nope, I'm not getting anything - procmail on my honeytrap spam email account sees it and stops it with a few simple filters

So please try harder, spammers, or go and get extensions to your obviously miniscule penises so you no longer need to take you inadequacies out on the rest of the world.

I am subscribed to a couple of mailing lists, I could never manage all that traffic with webmail. Instead I use a full-featured MUA called mutt with procmail to sort things out and handle spam with SpamAssassin.

And wherever I am on the Internet, I can always ssh home and grep around all my mail archives to find something back. It's all searchable online, so to speak.

http://www.procmail.org/procmail.HISTORY.html

This file contains a summary of changes made in various versions of procmail up to and including the current release. It is derived from the HISTORY file that is included in source distributions. For information on downloading the current release please see the Procmail homepage.
Only the last entry is complete, the others might have been condensed.

1990/12/07: v1.00
1990/12/12: v1.01
1991/02/04: v1.02
1991/02/13: v1.10
1991/02/21: v1.20
1991/02/22: v1.21
1991/03/01: v1.30
1991/03/15: v1.35

Why shut down your home system? Why not have it available as a server to make your life easier? I agree with other posters about using "offline" mode of Thunderbird and like clients.

In case you're thinking that you have a particularly repressive ISP...

My ISP blocks ports 80 and 25 - particularly irritating, if you ask me. My ISPs TOS, if read to the letter, would mean that multiple browser windows or tabbed browsing are inappropriate because it's more than one session over the broadband pipe.
 
I agree that it would be ideal if I could use every port I want, block the ones I want to firewall - but I'm too cheap to pay for that kind of access.
 
So I work around it. I use dyndns [dyndns.com] to create a pointer to my dynamic IP address. My ISP does not block https or ssh ports, so I leverage those to get what I want.
 
I use cron, fetchmail [berlios.de],
  procmail [procmail.org],
  spamassassin [apache.org], and
  postfix [postfix.org] to bring mail from my ISP to my local system.
 
I use uw-imapd [washington.edu] to share my mail with other computers on my home network
 
I use ssh and pine, or apache+php+MySQL+https (self-signed cert) with roundcube [roundcube.net] to get remote access to my IMAP server.
 
I use WinSCP [winscp.net] to get access to my files at home when I'm at work. My data is *MINE* and I easily back it up (nightly and offsite qurterly - snapshot backups coming soon thanks to rsnapshot [rsnapshot.org], perl and rsync)
 
Every tool that I use is free of charge and as free as the GPL and apache licenses are free (zealots can feel free to argue with someone else about the relative freedom of the GPL, thanks.)
 
I certainly could pay for more open TOS with an ISP - I could even host my applications at an ISP. I'm cheap, and this solution works well enough for me.
Hope you find a solution that works for you!
 
Respectfully,
Anomaly

My ISP blocks ports 80 and 25 - particularly irritating, if you ask me. My ISPs TOS, if read to the letter, would mean that multiple browser windows or tabbed browsing are inappropriate because it's more than one session over the broadband pipe.

I agree that it would be ideal if I could use every port I want, block the ones I want to firewall - but I'm too cheap to pay for that kind of access.

So I work around it. I use dyndns to create a pointer to my dynamic IP address. My ISP does not block https or ssh ports, so I leverage those to get what I want.

I use cron, fetchmail,
procmail,
spamassassin, and
postfix to bring mail from my ISP to my local system.

I use uw-imapd to share my mail with other computers on my home network

I use ssh and pine, or apache+php+MySQL+https (self-signed cert) with roundcube to get remote access to my IMAP server.

I use WinSCP to get access to my files at home when I'm at work. My data is *MINE* and I easily back it up (nightly and offsite qurterly - snapshot backups coming soon thanks to rsnapshot, perl and rsync)

Every tool that I use is free of charge and as free as the GPL and apache licenses are free (zealots can feel free to argue with someone else about the relative freedom of the GPL, thanks.)

I certainly could pay for more open TOS with an ISP - I could even host my applications at an ISP. I'm cheap, and this solution works well enough for me.

Respectfully,
Anomaly

I moved to Linux in 1994 as my primary desktop and server OS. About three years ago I decided that I wanted to produce some video content. Video editing was theoretically possible in Linux - I hooked up my camcorder to my Linux box and did some editing, but the tools were primitive and cofiguration was unusually difficult.

Eventually I looked at OS X and iLife. I decided to jump to a Mac. What a great move!

I found that Linux made it possible to do some things, but OS X made it simple to do them.

Fast forward a few years. I now have a few macs at home - their licensing policy makes it affordable to have several machines and a five user license for the OS and tools. My family loves the power and usability of the Mac.

Recently my linux server at home began acting a bit flaky. I did some analysis and determined that hardware replacement was needed. After checking prices for CPU/motherboard/RAM (and potentially hard disk) I figured out that I'd need a few hundred bucks to replace the CentOS box with a new one. After thinking about whether to drop a few hundred bucks or not on this server, it occurred to me that I might be able to move all of the services hosted on linux to OS X.

I found that samba,
  hotwayd,
  dansguardian,
  uw-imapd,
  fetchmail,
  procmail,
  spamassassin,
    rsync,
  rsnapshot,
  apache2,
  MySQL4,
  PHP,
  perl,
  java, and
  squid were all available for OS X.

Most of these are "in the box" with OS X. The only ones that I need to compile from source are uw-imapd and squid! Of course I need the bundled developer tools to get a compiler, and the Apple/BSD startup mechanism and the netinfo wierdness require some tweaks - but since when did Linux *not* require any tweaking?

What this means to me is that after more than a decade of running Linux at home (and work) I am *this* close to shutting down Linux for good at home.

Hope your experience is similar.

Regards,
Anomaly

PS - I share your recent comments about the loss of a pet. :(

I mostly use KMail at home for the same reasons. Though i use fetchmail to retrieve the mails and procmail to pipe them thru ClamAV and SpamAssassin and finally sort them with some scripts of my own.

The fact Kmail use mail dir format, as mutt, let me also check my mail from a remote ssh session.

Some people might want to have a look to AMaVIS or check SWiK about
- emails
- fetchmail
- procmail
- ClamAV
- SpamAssassin
- KMail (nothing really here)
- mutt

• ion | ratpoision; Pane-based (v. window-based) window managers. Little to no wasted screen real estate. Significantly reduced mouse usage.
• emacs: Wickedly powerful text editor/operating environment.
  • WhizzyTeX: Updates DVI in another window as you edit TeX/LaTeX.
  • AUCTeX: Very powerful emacs extensions for TeX/LaTeX.
• fetchmail + procmail + mutt + spamassassin + msmtp: No-nonsense mail reading and sending.
• bash completions: Quasi-telepathic tab completion.
• Firefox
  • Adblock: Saves an astonishing amount of screen real estate.
• screen: Among many other abilities, screen+ssh can provide VNC-like capabilities for your terminal sessions.

I have personal email going back 10 years or so. I'm also on a couple of high volume email lists and get ~500 emails/day.

I keep everything in mbox format. I archive high volume mboxes with archivemail, so everything older than 90 days gets gzipped. Procmail sorts all my mail, spammassassin strips out the garbage, etc.

I use mutt as my email client. It's as powerful as any other program I've used, and because it's text mode I can ssh into my home machine and check my mail from anywhere.

I suppose this is somewhat of a stoneage type setup, but I've been using it for years and I've never seen a reason to upgrade.

Convert everything into mbox format. formail will help you with that.

Use mairix to search through email.

mutt is the best mail client ever.

-rsw

Otherwise, I run my own mail server with blacklists and SPAM filtering, further filtering with my mail client, leaving me very few junk mail messages to actually deal with. As far as I know, no false positives have been lost. The server ignores suspected servers, andthe spam filter throws away any high-scoring mail, leaving low-scoring spam for the mail client to handle, which gives me a chance to find mail I would want to keep (very, very, rare), tossing the rest in the trash can so I can peruse them.

I have a web mail client, too, so I can check in from anywhere I can't fire up my client or shell in.

Also, I don't worry about space. I'm casual (OK, lazy) about deleting mail, and after several years of not deleting what should probably be deleted I've only accumulated a couple hundred MB of crap. (Yes, it's sorted automatically into folders by sender or content.) That includes old "let's have lunch" announcements as well as mail with large attachements. The server's got another 50GB of space on it (slowly being eaten by web server and mail logs), so I'm not too worried about running out any time soon.

1 GB would suffice and give me another few years to fill up. Then I'd probably have to get rid of those lunch invites from 1998...

I live in text mode. Here's a selection of my preferred apps. Most of these are still in active development (though some are more active than others).

screen. Simply indispensable. It slices and dices console sessions. Pretty much everything I do, I do in screen. I've a page elsewhere that describes everything screen does for me.

zsh. My shell of choice. Think of all the good features of bash, ksh, and tcsh rolled together. (Without much of the ickiness, particularly the csh heritage.) Personally, the killer application of zsh was that fact that not only did it have context-sensitive completion but (unlike tcsh) it shipped with hordes of completion definitions right out of the box. Type 'dpkg -L fo<tab>' and zsh will autocomplete on the Debian packages currently installed on your system. With an ssh-agent running, type 'scp otherhost:fo<tab>' and zsh will ssh to the other system and autocomplete on the files available on that host.

irssi. The best IRC client I've come across, certainly beating out IrcII, BitchX, and even epic. Multiple windows, extensible, tons of plugins available.

bitlbee. This is actually an IRC-to-Instant-Messaging gateway. It allows me to use irssi and the IRC environment with which I am so familiar to also deal with those of my friends and family who insist on using the various IM services.

snownews. curses-based RSS aggregator. I shopped around a bit before finding an aggregator that I liked. snownews does everything I need.

mutt. Possibly the best mail client around, GUI or not. While pine is okay (and simpler to use), mutt is much more customizable and scales better to large volumes of email.

procmail. Again, not exactly command line, but essential to my email usage.

Emacs. My text-mode editor of choice. Feel free to substitute XEmacs or vi (preferably vim) at your own preference. I prefer emacs to vi, though I know a decent amount of vi, as any sysadmin should. I actually like XEmacs a little better than GNU Emacs, but GNU Emacs has better UTF-8 support.

w3m. There's also links; I'm not tremendously familiar with it because w3m fills all of my needs and it used to be the case that w3m had better HTML support than links, but I don't believe this is any longer the case. Of note is the fact that w3m can do tabbed browsing, though it's not multithreaded, so you can't read one tab while another is loading. Also, if you run w3m with a valid $DISPLAY, it can even show images in the pages it displays.

moosic. This is a music jukebox. The features that distinguish it from other such programs are twofold. First, it runs as a standalone server; you interact with it via a command line client. (In theory, a curses or GUI client could be written, but to my knowledge none yet has.) Second, it's customizable with regards to how it plays music. It has a config file where you tell it what programs to use to play various music formats (it does come with reasonable defaults). Someone elsewhere in this article pointed out mpd; I'll have to look at that, but it at least doesn't appear to support the various MOD formats.

mplayer. It does more or less require some graphical output (X, framebuffer, whatever), but it's run and displays it status in text mod

It was first published in 1990.

...even though my procmail system had defanged the filename so he had to rename it. What're ya gonna do?

I have procmail set up to delete certain attachments, although forcing it to run along with SpamAssassin on my web host is proving to turn more than a few hairs gray... but when I do, I swear, I will be an ubergeek, I swear! Qmail, procmail, et al are great tools to defang spam for family consumption, as well as reduce download times for myself. Even over cable, I spent way too long downloading "Microsoft fixes" from "Hotmail addresses."

To which he is contributing to the problem he's bitching about with this.

Do you want to keep track of your eBay auctions? Instead of five e-mails per auction, all scattered throughout your inbox, you would have a single flag in the control panel. Discussion groups? The control panel would show when hot topics of interest to you are being discussed and would call attention to discussions with contributions by writers you particularly respect.

It's almost 2004, and this guy still doesn't know about Procmail and what a kill file is?

E-mail? Restricted to truly personal communication. Newsletters, intranet status reports, and other nonletter communications would be summarized and available for perusal on request.

Isn't that why Procmail and SpamAssassin exist?

IM would have a small role, but your personal agent would be very strict at screening incoming requests.

Unless you're a complete moron completely lacking self-control, odds are you set yourself do-not-disturb when you're managing a lot of state.

To which he is contributing to the problem he's bitching about with this.

Do you want to keep track of your eBay auctions? Instead of five e-mails per auction, all scattered throughout your inbox, you would have a single flag in the control panel. Discussion groups? The control panel would show when hot topics of interest to you are being discussed and would call attention to discussions with contributions by writers you particularly respect.

It's almost 2004, and this guy still doesn't know about Procmail and what a kill file is?

E-mail? Restricted to truly personal communication. Newsletters, intranet status reports, and other nonletter communications would be summarized and available for perusal on request.

Isn't that why Procmail and SpamAssassin exist?

IM would have a small role, but your personal agent would be very strict at screening incoming requests.

Unless you're a complete moron completely lacking self-control, odds are you set yourself do-not-disturb when you're managing a lot of state.

Procmail is your friend. Use it. In conjunction with SpamAssassin, you can filter it off to a folder to go send to SpamCop at your earliest convienence. While SpamCop officially discourages doing so, setting your mail server to reject based on the RBL bl.spamcop.net will save you some work (and money if you're a SpamCop member) by prohibiting mail from sites already reported by several people.

I use exim in conjunction with sa-exim to reject spam that scores high with Spamassassin, and to teergrube the luser. Since I'm the postmaster, I also have sa-exim give all the sa-exim rejected spam to my spam folder to report as well.

I have roughly 30 users. Almost all of them use my site for mail, since doing so is extremely spam hostile thanks to me, with very little inconvienence, if any, to legitimate mailers, which is the way it should be.

On an aside, I also use abuse.net's forwarding service to report hosts infected with viruses to their ISPs. I've been fairly successful, though it could be better. Roughly one third of the ISPs I contact suspend or terminate the user's account for it. I also maintain a net-lsearchable list of the last relay such infected messages go through before hitting my server. Feel free to use it for yourself, it's on my website.

You have a variety of options:

- this one

- that one

Once you have procmail set up, it would be trivial to extract names and addresses into a MySQL database and use it from there.

Some argue procmail syntax is difficult to understand, but so do all beautiful, powerful languages appear to the benighted. :)

What happens if you want to check your email with something like SquirrelMail? No filters, so your spam gets in.

The answer is, as always, Procmail combined with SpamAssassin.

Client-side filtering is for sucks.

Spam is a social problem, just like any other type of fraud.

Yes, often the goods and/or services promoted through spam are fraud, but spam itself is not fraud. It is advertising.

As for the problem, I see it as a technical problem, as in "Why can't my damn service provider reject email with forged headers, from unsecured servers, from ISP's that are notorious for hosting spamers, and is obviously and easily recognised as spam by even the most half-assed filters? I guess I'll have to get my service somewhere else or check and filter it myself."

I haven't been "on the 'net" all that long (about seven years), but I still wonder when it happened that my fellow "netizens" started begging to be regulated. If you have a spam problem, do something about it. Learn something about the problems with open relays, irresponsible ISPs and how touse procmail to filter spam.

Help others learn by pointing them in the right direction.

Encourage your provider to take proper measures to stop spam from entering or exiting thier domain, and put pressure on other providers to do the same.

Don't use services that encourage spammers (Hotmail, AOL, MSN, Mail.com, etc)

Stop asking lawmakers who don't understand the problem to do something about it.

procmail should do the trick...

But mailing list software - there are dozens for unix. Pretty poor example. Mailman, ListProc, Smartlist, Sympa, ...

Thank Ghu for tools like procmail, tmda, and spamoracle.

... but seeing as how most of my SPAM is from out of the country... oh well. This is a good start to get American business SPAM out of my inbox, I'll have to rely on procmail and SpamAssassin for the rest of it, I guess.

Absolutely. I have a GNU/Linux (Debian) system at home which uses Fetchmail to pop emails off my ISP account. Fetchmail delivers to Postfix for local delivery. Postfix calls Procmail as part of its configuration. Procmail first pipes incoming mails through Spamassassin. If Spamassassin decides that the mail is suspect, it is placed in to a "caughtspam" mbox for later examination/deletion.

The postfix config is a basic:
mailbox_command = procmail -a "$EXTENSION"

The procmail config is as simple as:
:0fw
| spamassassin

:0:
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
caughtspam

This has cut down my personal time spent on processing emails by many many times. OK, so it's not exactly the most computationally cheap method of filtering spam, but the box isn't doing anything else particularly important and CPU cycles are cheap.

All I now need to do is go through the "caughtspam" mbox every now and again (nicely managed using Mutt) and double-check whether anything has slipped through. Only one email has been badly marked by Spamassassin and that was due to the sender incorporating lots of spam phrases in the email.

This is a job for...

P R O C M A I L ! ! !

Really, this thing is amazing, and it's probably already installed by your distro on Linux. On BSD it's in ports - and you can build source for Solaris, etc. If procmail needs help, it comes with formail, and both play well with sed in a script.

BTW: an answer to a very similar question from the procmail list. YMMV.

If I have time I'll write a formal HOWTO and maybe submit it to /. In the meantime, here's a synopsis:

You need a Linux machine with a static IP address. If you can't have a static IP I suppose you can play games with dynamic IP addresses to access the server. Get a DNS entry to make it easier to access.

Set up fetchmail . Fetchmail is a simple program (written by ESR) which downloads mail via POP or IMAP. You configure it with your mail server, username, and password, and it downloads mail to the local machine. Actually, it re-delivers your mail locally. Your remote email might be chris2912@earthlink.net, and your username on your Linux server might be ces; fetchmail delivers the mail it downloads to ces@localhost.

At this point, you can use pine or mutt to read your mail. By default, they read mail from your local spool. Note that your "inbox" is /var/spool/mail/username, but other mail folders are usually under your home directory. Configure pine or mutt to put your mail folders in ~/mail.

Install procmail. Procmail allows you to set up filters for handling mail. It will let you move mail to a folder based on sender (something like various mail client's rules) and more importantly, it will let you run SpamAssassin (or junkfilter, but I recommend SpamAssassin). Set up procmail to run SpamAssassin on each email, and then either delete the spam or move it to a certain folder. The SpamAssassin documentation is pretty clear on how to do this. Make sure procmail is configured to use the folders in ~/mail.

Install an IMAP server. I use the standard UW server; there are others. The UW server runs via [x]inetd. I recommend setting up the SSL support (imaps).

What IMAP does is allow you to access your email remotely, without downloading it like POP. Mail is kept on the server, in folders. Through an IMAP client, you "subscribe" to a certain set of folders; these are the only folders IMAP clients will see. You want to configure your IMAP clients to use ~/mail as your root folder; otherwise you will see any other folders in your home directory (IMAP isn't limited to email).

When you set up an IMAP client (Outlook will work, though Outlook 2000 has an annoying bug, always reporting "server dropped connection", I use Mozilla mail) you provide the IP address of your server, and your username and password on that server.

IMAP is strange about deleting. Many IMAP clients by default want to move deleted messages into a folder. That's okay if you want to do that, I prefer to actually delete them. Even if you actually delete a message, it is only marked as deleted; it's still there until you purge it. Pine asks if you want to purge messages when you leave a folder; other clients do similar things.

Finally, install a web email package. IMP is the best, but it can be very hard to set up. I resorted to another package called squirrelmail before I finally got IMP set up. Squirrelmail is perfectly fine. Configure the package to use IMAP, using localhost as the server.

That's the basic points. Email me at ceswiedler@mindspring.com if you want any further help.

AmaVis: Antivirus filtering daemon; packaged by most linux distros; multi-threaded (recognized multiple CPU's); sends out email alerts; very configurable; supports many antivirus scanners; works well with postfix; written in Perl; GPL

Clam Antivirus (clamav): virus scanner; written in C; fast; virus definition update tool included; uses virus definitions from the Open Antivirus project; (does not disinfect, just identifies); GPL

SpamAssassin: Perl-based Spam filter; use with Procmail; client-server architecture (one daemon); Perl Artistic License

Our application of the above software seems to work quite well. We server about a thousand users (about 100 "heavy users"), and the average server load rarely gets above 0.21 with a Dual AMD 1500+ MP that provides SMTP, IMAP, and POP all w/SSL enabled.

Good lord, haven't they ever heard of procmail:

:0:
* ^From:.+al-quaida.org
terrorist

Perhaps that's what all the open source debate at
the Pentagon was really about.

Procmail is your friend. As soon as I get more than 4 or 5 copies of a spam / worm / virus, it gets a procmail rule to autodelete it. Simple, really...

...I have yet to send email to someone who refuses to read/accept it because it was not PGP encrypted.

I do by using a combination of procmail and mail-bounce. Here's how.

There are three major points for my perfect email client:

1. Look and feel the same in X and console, so that I could make use of both xpdf/mozilla and remote mail reading.
2. Localization. Being non-native english speaker, this one is pretty important.
3. Keyboard navigation

For the last 4 years I am extremely satisfied with the combination:
- fetchmail (getting mail)
- procmail (sorting mail into mailboxes)
- mutt (reading/replying)
- vim (editing)

When it comes down to analyze mailbox and generate some reports, like for example, in the case with antivirus reports, I use perl with Mail::MboxParser module.

For all my friends, who need GUI to read email, I recommend using Mozilla and or Evolution

Lots of spam would just drop out of sight if those jerks had to include their real email address.

Of course it would. The spammers would be dragged out into the street and hung with nooses made of their own email lists :)

Seriously though, it's nice in some ways to see that the spam sitution on the net has gotten to a point where the Government can't seem to ignore it anymore. On the other hand, I think it behooves people to help themselves when it comes to spam. Effective use of Procmail can really help a person cut the spam out of their email diets. And with tools like Vipul's Razor, you can help OTHERS avoid getting the same spam in the future.

Absolutely, these HTML mails are dangerous with their 1x1 gifs with a custom URL so "they" know you've read the message.

I check the source and add the urls to junkbuster's list. If the filters don't get the mail, then the images still don't get requested.

If anyone's interested, I have the scripts up on my website. filter-html is an awk script that strips HTML out of a message. You can use it by itself as a filter for procmail. If you want to send a warning to lamers who send you HTML mail, you'll also want to get filter-html-mail, a shell script called by procmail to feed the message to filter-html and generate the warning message (note that it also assumes that you use qmail as your MTA).

procmail:

:0 B
* TRUSTe
/dev/null

Write a procmail filter that looks for filename="blahblahblah.doc" in the headers or body (this would usually be in a MIME subheader, hence the body of the message-as-a-whole), and pass it through a script that sends back that exact reply.

:0 HBhb
* filename=\".*\.doc\"
| /home/jraxis/bin/doc-bounce.pl

or something similar. Writing the script is your job. :)

Tomlinson may think he gets a lot of email, but he doesn't.

Tomlinson may think he gets a lot of email, but he doesn't.

I get twice that in spam a day. (Which never reaches my inbox thanks to Spambouncer)

Total e-mail, I get ~1000 a day, only 2-3 of which actually go into my inbox. The rest being filtered by procmail into various mailing list folders to which I subscribe. Out of those 2-3 at least one is a forward from my mother which has 10 pages of AOL addresses and a little poem on the bottom which tells me to forward this to 10 people and my cat will have puppies.

But thats a different complain altogether...

It can be done with procmail


:0
* ^content-type: application/octet-stream
/dev/null

postfix,
cyrus-imapd,
squirrel mail,
and procmail

Now for all your backup stuff, write a procmail line to save a copy of all mail. Its really easy. You could extend these tools to do everything exchange does in an afternoon, and continue supporting your outlook clients.

They maintian a set of shared Procmail filters; basically the idea is we forward all spam received to a special Panix email address, and if its deemed to indeed be spam, they add enough information to the filters so we don't receive any more junk from this particular source.

It seems to come in waves, probably depending upon how much spammers change their tactics, but I don't really get that much spam - overall averaging maybe half dozen out of about fifty or sixty legitimate emails per day.

By contrast I also have a shell account at The World, and don't use procmail there since I've never used nor distributed that email address.

Last week I opened my email there for the first time in about one year and MY GOD!IT WAS FULL OF SPAM!

your new bicycle at this rate will probably have spam too, and it'll be powered by you pedalling!

How long before procmail gets ported to OnStar? Hey, Linux has been ported to everything under the sun; why not procmail?

I use SmartList, which comes with Procmail. It's kind of a hassle to initially install (there's no smurfy GUI) but it's basic, poweful, and works without any stupidity getting in the way. User subscriptions and unsubscriptions are handled via the time-honored mechanism of mailing to list-request addresses.

The last time this came up, lots of people recommended MailMan. As a user, I hate Mailman. So as a mailing list admin, I won't inflict it on people. Here's why:

Compare and contrast this sequence of actions:

With sane mailing list software:

• Mail "unsubscribe" to "foo-request".
• Get "please confirm" mail back.
• Reply.
• Done.

With Mailman:

• Mail "unsubscribe" to "foo-request".
• Get "I don't understand that" mail back.
• Find the admin URL in that web page.
• Load the web page.
• Try to log in.
• Realize you don't remember the password it generated for you, because you haven't ever used it even once.
• Find the "mail me my password" button.
• Wait for the password to arrive.
• Go back to the web page.
• Try to log in.
• Waste some more time trying before you realize it doesn't work without cookies.
• Turn cookies back on.
• Log in.
• Find the unsubscribe link.
• Done.

Now which was easier?

So I use Smartlist for all my mailing lists. Though it is a pain in the ass to configure, it does the "reply to this to confirm" trick completely painlessly from the end user's point of view, and not having that is a deal breaker for me.

I understand that Mailman is trying to provide some measure of security by mailing passwords around, but mailed passwords don't work. By which I mean, they provide no more protection than the "reply to this message to be subscribed" mechanism does. So long as you can tell the web page to mail you your password, the only real validation that is going on is that the person issueing the subscribe request is a person capable of reading mail sent to the address they are subscribing.

It's important that mailing list software do this check, to avoid prank subscriptions. But the "reply to this" method is N less steps than the password-I-don't-know-I-have method, while being absolutely equivalent from a security point of view.

So the password thing is merely irritating and a waste of time: it has no benefits.

• Procmail.org
• Getting started with Procmail at spambouncer.org

I've used tarpitting to reduce the flow of spam through my mailserver, and it seems to work pretty well. There are patches out there for QMail (awesome) that seem to do the trick. There are other various recipes and such for procmail that work well. If you're looking to poison their spamlists, take a look at sugarplum, a spamlist poisoner for webservers. On a totally unrelated note, but on the same vein (poisonbots), take a look at peachpit, a censorware spider trap.