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For fighting email SPAM, I use
My email first passes through procmail filters which are set
up in the file ~/.procmailrc. First, email from known
mailing lists is routed to evolution email folders for later
search and perusal. Then, remaining email is filtered through
spamassassin, which is configured rather conservatively to
avoid false classification as spam. Anything declared as spam is
simply deleted because I found it completely impractical to check my
spam folder for misclassifications (too much spam). Finally, email
that survives spamassassin is piped through
Active Spam Killer (ASK)
for final delivery.
ASK is a set of light-weight python scripts providing a
simple challenge-response barrier for first-time email senders. After
responding once, senders are automatically whitelisted by ASK. (They
are then easily moved to an ignorelist or blacklist if needed.) The
default ``challenge'' is simply to simply reply to the
challenge-email. It would be easy to add a question or two if that
ever becomes necessary. In my experience so far, spammers do not
provide a working return email path, so they have no opportunity to
enable their email for delivery. Their undelivered email eventually
expires in the ASK queue and is quietly deleted.
Many vendor websites require email addresses. I give them an email
address of the form companyname@mydomain so that I can create
an automatic filter-folder for them in .procmailrc (when
their email might be important), or I can more easily ignore it when
it's just self-promoting advertisement (which is the norm).
It is also interesting to see which companies evidently sold my email
address to spammers. My ISP automatically forwards all unrecognized
email to my domain to a ``catch-all'' email account. In principle,
this same ``tagging'' approach can be used at gmail by using addresses
of the form you+companyName@gmail.com. However, in
practice, most company websites do not accept `+' in an email address,
in my experience. I retrieve this ``tagged email'' from my catch-all
email account on a particular home machine, sorting directly to
evolution folders via procmail filters. This keeps
it separate from my work email and minimizes the time spent looking at
it. Once in a while I might search the folder for a particular
company to see if there are any upgrade notices, etc.
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