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Unix Spam Filtering
Authored by: Chas on Apr 22, '02 06:16:34PM

I wrote a document about using Mail.app with Unix mailbox formats, derived from an anonymous tip from MacOS X Hints. It may shed some light on how to get Mail.app and Unix mailboxes to work together better, it also shows how to set up Procmail for spam filtering.

http://radio.weblogs.com/0104033/stories/2002/04/15/freeSpamFilteringForMacosX.html

If you like coding, you could easily write your own procmail scripts that send any keyword (like OTCBB:) to /dev/null, it will never get to your mailbox. I set up Procmail to reject all spam in languages I can't read, that alone killed half my spam burden. Procmail and SpamBouncer are especially useful for large mail sites, you can establish default filtration rules for all email accounts, but still allow local users to customize their own filters. Nice.

Filtering is effective but it is an administrative burden in many ways. Spam should be stopped at the source. Spam can still totally kill the usefullness of email even with filtering. I'm getting about 500 spams for each 1 legitimate email, it's flooding the net even if it doesn't get to my mailbox. What would you do if you turned on the TV and got 1 minute of real content for each 500 minutes of commercials?



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