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(gnus)Thwarting Email Spam


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Thwarting Email Spam
====================

   In these last days of the Usenet, commercial vultures are hanging
about and grepping through news like crazy to find email addresses they
can foist off their scams and products to.  As a reaction to this, many
people have started putting nonsense addresses into their `From' lines.
I think this is counterproductive--it makes it difficult for people to
send you legitimate mail in response to things you write, as well as
making it difficult to see who wrote what.  This rewriting may perhaps
be a bigger menace than the unsolicited commercial email itself in the
end.

   The biggest problem I have with email spam is that it comes in under
false pretenses.  I press `g' and Gnus merrily informs me that I have
10 new emails.  I say "Golly gee!  Happy is me!" and select the mail
group, only to find two pyramid schemes, seven advertisements ("New!
Miracle tonic for growing full, lustrous hair on your toes!")  and one
mail asking me to repent and find some god.

   This is annoying.

   The way to deal with this is having Gnus split out all spam into a
`spam' mail group (Note: Splitting Mail).

   First, pick one (1) valid mail address that you can be reached at,
and put it in your `From' header of all your news articles.  (I've
chosen `larsi@trym.ifi.uio.no', but for many addresses on the form
`larsi+usenet@ifi.uio.no' will be a better choice.  Ask your sysadmin
whether your sendmail installation accepts keywords in the local part
of the mail address.)

     (setq message-default-news-headers
           "From: Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@trym.ifi.uio.no>\n")

   Then put the following split rule in `nnmail-split-fancy' (Note:
Fancy Mail Splitting):

     (
      ...
      (to "larsi@trym.ifi.uio.no"
           (| ("subject" "re:.*" "misc")
              ("references" ".*@.*" "misc")
              "spam"))
      ...
     )

   This says that all mail to this address is suspect, but if it has a
`Subject' that starts with a `Re:' or has a `References' header, it's
probably ok.  All the rest goes to the `spam' group.  (This idea
probably comes from Tim Pierce.)

   In addition, many mail spammers talk directly to your `smtp' server
and do not include your email address explicitly in the `To' header.
Why they do this is unknown--perhaps it's to thwart this thwarting
scheme?  In any case, this is trivial to deal with--you just put
anything not addressed to you in the `spam' group by ending your fancy
split rule in this way:

     (
      ...
      (to "larsi" "misc")
      "spam")

   In my experience, this will sort virtually everything into the right
group.  You still have to check the `spam' group from time to time to
check for legitimate mail, though.  If you feel like being a good net
citizen, you can even send off complaints to the proper authorities on
each unsolicited commercial email--at your leisure.

   If you are also a lazy net citizen, you will probably prefer
complaining automatically with the `gnus-junk.el' package, available as
free software at
`http://stud2.tuwien.ac.at/~e9426626/gnus-junk.html'.  Since most
e-mail spam is sent automatically, this may reconcile the cosmic
balance somewhat.

   This works for me.  It allows people an easy way to contact me (they
can just press `r' in the usual way), and I'm not bothered at all with
spam.  It's a win-win situation.  Forging `From' headers to point to
non-existent domains is yucky, in my opinion.


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