Procmail just saved me from my big spam problem.
On Windows I use K9, which I highly recommend, but since I switched to Ubuntu I haven't had a spam filter (at least, besides what TextDrive does for everyone at the server level, which is pretty good). The vast majority of my spam is sent to bogus e-mail addresses at my catch-all. In K9 I had a blacklist for those addresses, which were stable (i.e. not random. It seems someone generated bogus addresses at my domain and sold them as part of a list), and K9 filtered at the client-side.
Since TextDrive is rolling out a new mail system soon complete with server side DSPAM (which is supposed to be great), I didn't want to go through the trouble of installing a client-side spam filter on Linux. But just recently I started getting over 1000 messages a day, mostly large multiples of the same messages (even to the same address!), all to addresses that I previously had blacklisted. So, I figured I'd at least put that blacklist back in place. Here's how I did it in procmail:
In .procmailrc:
INCLUDERC=$HOME/.procmailblacklist
And .procmailblacklist:
LINEBUF=4096
:0
* ^TO_(adkins|\
alvarez|\
aguilar|\
andrews|\
arez|\
armstrong|\
#... for about 300 more addresses
woods)\
@keithdevens\.com
/dev/null
At first I was exceeding the default LINEBUF, which is 2048, but luckily you can set it, so I bumped it up to be large enough to hold the whole regex in memory, based on the size of .procmailblacklist. I hope this will save someone else a little time in setting up a similar blacklist.
Update: What's fun is I can watch this work by monitoring procmail's log file. Just in the short time this has been in place it's already blocked about 140 messages. Update: make that >200. Update: >400. I was going to go to bed tonight without having put this filter in. I'm glad I didn't do that.
Friday, April 22, 2005
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