Spam Mail?

Hello again all
I have a friend who has dial-up internet access through an Australian
ISP that does not have any form of spam filtering on their server. I was
at his house one day when he checked his emails and he had over 150,
only about 4 of which were genuine emails and the rest was spam. It took
him about 30 minutes to download it all and then lots more time to
delete all the spam messages. As he is on a casual hourly rate this is
costing him money.
Is there a program that will check the mail headers on the server and
delete the spam before he actually has to download the mail? I know of
some graphical ones that run in KDE and GNOME but they need you to check
manually first. I would like to set up an automatic one if possible.
Any help would be gratefully accepted.

Greg
(E-Mail Removed)


Greg Gailer

On Son, 23 Mai 2004 at 10:01 GMT, Greg Gailer wrote:
> Hello again all
> I have a friend who has dial-up internet access through an Australian
> ISP that does not have any form of spam filtering on their server. I was
> at his house one day when he checked his emails and he had over 150,
> only about 4 of which were genuine emails and the rest was spam. It took
> him about 30 minutes to download it all and then lots more time to
> delete all the spam messages. As he is on a casual hourly rate this is
> costing him money.

Mozilla has an email-client with a very good spam-filter. But you still
need to download the messages. Theres is also a stand-alone client (I
guess Firefox or Thunderbird is its name).

> Is there a program that will check the mail headers on the server and
> delete the spam before he actually has to download the mail?

Unfortunately you often can't decide whether a mail is Spam or not by
just considering the header. The only way I can imagine is filtering on
header fields like "From: ", "To: " or "Content-Type: ". This type of
filtering is provocating misdetection of spam.

>I know of
> some graphical ones that run in KDE and GNOME but they need you to check
> manually first. I would like to set up an automatic one if possible.
> Any help would be gratefully accepted.
>

For this approach I think you need to be admin of the mailserver or at
least a shell account to use tools like spamassin and the like.

> Greg
> (E-Mail Removed)

I have not really a solution to avoid the traffic caused by downloading
the messages.

A good way to download the messages with a minimum of costs possible is
the use of fetchmail with the --monitor <interface> option, I
think. This makes fetchmail downloading messages only when the
dialup-connection is opened or used by another application. That was the
setup I used when I dealed with time based costs for my
dialup-connection. But still, the spam-filter runs on the mailbox at
one of your boxes.

HTH
--

Robert...

On Sun, 23 May 2004 20:01:12 +1000, Greg Gailer <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> Is there a program that will check the mail headers on the server and
> delete the spam before he actually has to download the mail? I know of
> some graphical ones that run in KDE and GNOME but they need you to check
> manually first. I would like to set up an automatic one if possible.
> Any help would be gratefully accepted.

MIMEDefang (http://www.mimedefang.org) can be configured to do this. Check
out these FAQs:

http://www.mimedefang.org/node.php?id=18
http://www.mimedefang.org/node.php?id=23

--
-- Skylar Thompson ((E-Mail Removed))
-- http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/

On Sun, 23 May 2004 20:07:51 GMT, Skylar Thompson <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> On Sun, 23 May 2004 20:01:12 +1000, Greg Gailer
> <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>> Is there a program that will check the mail headers on the server and
>> delete the spam before he actually has to download the mail? I know of
>
> MIMEDefang (http://www.mimedefang.org) can be configured to do this.
> Check out these FAQs:
>
> http://www.mimedefang.org/node.php?id=18
> http://www.mimedefang.org/node.php?id=23
>
Another option might be popsneaker. It will delete mail at your ISP
before downloading it. I used it at one time and had fetchmail call
it before downloading my email.

There are a couple of other programs that are very similiar to
popsneaker but right now, can't think of them.

Popsneaker can be found at:

http://www.freshmeat.net

Just search for popsneaker.

--
Frank Hahn

Absent, adj.:
Exposed to the attacks of friends and acquaintances; defamed;
slandered.

Greg Gailer <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in news:40b07366$0$2298
$(E-Mail Removed):

> Is there a program that will check the mail headers on the server and
> delete the spam before he actually has to download the mail? I know of

I use and like mailfilter. You can download my .mailfilterrc from

ftp://yesican.chsoft.biz/pub/mailfilterrc

to see how mine is configured. No filter is perfect but mine gets 85% or
better without trashing wanted mail (ham).

"Robert W." <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message news:<c8pvgl$ggl$00$(E-Mail Removed)>...
> On Son, 23 Mai 2004 at 10:01 GMT, Greg Gailer wrote:
> > Hello again all
> > I have a friend who has dial-up internet access through an Australian
> > ISP that does not have any form of spam filtering on their server. I was
> > at his house one day when he checked his emails and he had over 150,
> > only about 4 of which were genuine emails and the rest was spam. It took
> > him about 30 minutes to download it all and then lots more time to
> > delete all the spam messages. As he is on a casual hourly rate this is
> > costing him money.
>
> Mozilla has an email-client with a very good spam-filter. But you still
> need to download the messages. Theres is also a stand-alone client (I
> guess Firefox or Thunderbird is its name).
>
> > Is there a program that will check the mail headers on the server and
> > delete the spam before he actually has to download the mail?
>
> Unfortunately you often can't decide whether a mail is Spam or not by
> just considering the header. The only way I can imagine is filtering on
> header fields like "From: ", "To: " or "Content-Type: ". This type of
> filtering is provocating misdetection of spam.

Can't you pretty much chuck away anything that doesn't have a
resolvable domain? No point have a mail from (E-Mail Removed) if
you can't reply...

....snip, snip...
I use "mailfilter" which is probably in most Linux distributions. It
examines the header, then applies filters ("regular expressions" which
you create) to accept messages that pass the filter (i.e. White list)
or to discard messages that pass the filter (i.e. Black list). It is
a bit tricky to create filters that are effective on spam but do not
discard possible valid messages. Very tight filtering is easy if you
just "White list" your known correspondents and discard everything
else. But then, of course, no new contacts can reach you.

On Die, 25 Mai 2004 at 18:46 GMT, Gene Stemple wrote:

[snip and mailfilter and snip]

> Very tight filtering is easy if you
> just "White list" your known correspondents and discard everything
> else. But then, of course, no new contacts can reach you.
>

Just an idea: When mail is send, one should have a script, which is
checking the whitelist and updates it, when necessary. But how to run
the script automatically? Does anyone have some experiences with this
already?

--

Robert...