APANA WA Other Resources

Spam Bouncing

INTRODUCTION

I have just set up a utility called Spam Bouncer on Odyssey which you can use to delete spam mail from your inbox as it arrives. Spam Bouncer is a freeware utility by Catherine A. Hampton whose Web page describing how to set up the product is at http://www.spambouncer.org.

If you would like to enable Spam Bouncer for your Membership, you must follow the instructions below precisely. If you do not follow the instructions correctly, you could lose email! For the same reason, do this all in one session - don't follow half of the instructions and leave the other half for another day.

INSTRUCTIONS

If you are on a PPP/SLIP connection (ie. not a shell or "plain text" connection), telnet to your Membership. If you don't know how to telnet to your Membership, what follows may be too complicated for you. However don't hesitate to email me with questions.
Type "ln -s /usr/local/bin/spambounce/ spambounce" and press Enter. (If you can, copy the line above and paste it into your telnet session, to guard against typos.)
Type "cp spambounce/.forward ." and press Enter
Now you have a choice:
(a) if you read your email from your shell Membership and want spam email to be sorted into a separate "spam-incoming" folder, type "cp spambounce/.procmailrc ." and press Enter.
(b) if you read your email from your shell Membership and want spam email to be deleted, type "cp spambounce/.procmailrc_delspam ./.procmailrc" and press Enter.
(c) if you read your email from a graphical mailer program eg. under Windows or Macintosh, type "cp spambounce/.procmailrc_pop ./.procmailrc" and press Enter.
If you sometimes read your mail from the shell Membership then you can choose to use (a) or (b) above, however you won't be able to retreive certain suspicious or bulk emails using your POP mail client.
Type "pico .forward" and press Enter.
You are now in an editor called "pico". It is fairly simple to use; you can navigate using the arrow keys.
Add your login name between the # and the " at the end of the first line. Then press ^x (hold down control and press "x"), then press "y", then press Enter.
Type "pico .procmailrc" and press Enter.
Add your login name to the end of the line near the top that says "LOGIN=". For instance, if your email address is malcolm@odyssey.apana.org.au, the line should read "LOGIN=malcolm".
If you subscribe to any mailing lists, it is very strongly recommended (for safety's sake) that you make one other amendment. This is to find the lines that say:
```
:0:
* ^TOmailing-list@address.goes.here
| $FORMAIL -A"X-Sorted: Bulk" >>$BULKFOLDER.
```
and to modify the address "mailing-list@address.goes.here" to the submission address of the mailing list. If you subscribe to more than two mailing lists, feel free to duplicate the three lines above as many times as you want.
Press ^x (hold down control and press "x"), then press "y", then press Enter.
Test your setup by emailing yourself a message and seeing if it comes through. Then use Deja News to post a message to "alt.sex", and see if any spam mails come through! :-)

EXPLANATION

Basically what spambouncer does is the following:

For shell Members:

Spam email is either deleted, or sorted into a mail folder called (by default) spam.incoming, depending on which of the two options you selected above.
Bulk email (eg. from mailing lists, or sent to addresses like all- users@odyssey.apana.org.au) is sorted into a folder called bulk.incoming.
Mail from mailer daemons (usually bounced mail - mail that could not be delivered), and mail from administrative addresses like root, admin, sysadmin, and abuse is sorted into a folder called admin.incoming.
Suspicious email which may or may not be spam is sorted into a folder called block.incoming. It is best to check this folder from time to time, as some legitimate mail can slip through here.

For Members with graphical mail clients:

Administrative, bulk and blocked email is sorted into your regular email inbox. The only difference from normal is that additional headers are added: "X-SpamBouncer: Admin", "X-SpamBouncer: Blocked" and "X-SpamBouncer: Default". (If you don't know what headers are, don't worry about it.)
You may be able to create individual folders for each of these types of email on your client program, and then set your client program's filter to look for this header and filter mail which has it into the appropriate folder. Eudora is capable of doing this, I believe.
Spam is deleted. At the moment I have not given you the option of having spam sorted into your regular email inbox with the header "X-SpamBouncer: Spam", because I doubt that most people would have any use for this facility. However this is very easy to do if you would like it: email me for details.

ADVANCED USE

Spambouncer's database of spam domain names is updated on a regular basis. The current version is dated 31 October 1997. I will be keeping the database up to date, and these updates will automatically be available to all Members without any intervention on their part.

The instructions above are to set up the "lite" version of Spam Bouncer. The full version is a bit more complicated, and thus more likely to go wrong. Although the full version has also been installed on Odyssey, I CANNOT OFFER SUPPORT FOR IT. If you are interested in experimenting with it for yourself, check out the author's Web page referenced above. You will have to make a few more amendments to your .procmailrc file which are described in detail on that page.

The main difference between the full version and the lite version is that the full version automatically sends complaint messages to the spamsters' service providers. It also replies to any "suspicious" mails and tells the senders that their mail has been sorted into a bulk folder which you are unlikely to read. If they wish to send the message again, they can include a password in the subject line, and the email will then be sorted into your regular inbox.

Jeremy Malcolm

POSTSCRIPT

If you have friends who use a free email service such as Hotmail or Rocketmail, you will notice that Spam Bouncer assumes their messages to be suspicious, and sorts them into your blocked mail folder by default. To prevent this behaviour, you need to create a file called "nobounce" in your root directory containing the email addresses of Members whose mail you don't want to filter for spam. There should be one email address per line. You can also allow messages from an entire domain by prefixing the domain with a @ symbol in your nobounce file.

alec879@hotmail.com
sbn@microsoft.com
@microsoft.com
members@www.scifi.com
@scifi.com
rageflower@rocketmail.com
webmaster@fandom.net
@fandom.net
sfzines@geocities.com
diamonds@usa.net

I have written a script which makes it easy to add new entries to your nobounce file. It is called add2nb, and you can use it simply by entering a command such as the following from your Unix shell Membership:

add2nb user@domain.com

In fact, I recommend using the add2nb command rather than editing the nobounce file directly, because if you accidentally add a blank line to the nobounce file it can cause Spam Bouncer to stop working.

Buying internet access in bulk for our members.

Spam Bouncing