(Subject changed to avoid Chuq's filters!)

At 12:40 AM 9/27/2001, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
>As far as I can tell (and as far as I'm concerned), any mail I get that
>referencee that site is spam, and is tossed into the spam folder. Which is
>how I saw this -- I'm clearing that folder out, and setting that procmail
>rule to /dev/null. Good timing!

Well, you can do what you want, but it's "generally accepted practice"
to 'whitelist' or 'greenlist' subscribed mailing lists and other
known sources (your boss, your mother) before dumping mail.  The
mail you responded to just disproved your "any mail I get that
referencee that site is spam" hypothesis.

It's also "generally accepted" that it's virtually impossible to
identify spam by body content alone.  A number of well-meaning admins
(which I consider incompetent, since they're deleting SOMEBODY ELSE's
mail) have been tossing discussions about viruses, based on
overly-simple-minded body filters.

You don't have to accept my definition of "generally accepted," but
that's how I choose to interpret the discussions on the procmail
mailing list (see the procmail man page to subscribe).  If anyone
reading this is contemplating using procmail to filter, I'd
recommend subscribing to that list for a while, at least until
your recipes are stable.

[Since you're using procmail, you can probably improve your
false-match rate by using "scoring" if you're going to use
body filters anyway, by counting things rather than just
the match/nomatch criteria available in the simple typical
MUA filters.]

Cheers,
Stan


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