Procmail documentation (Large)
Table of contents
1.0 Document id
1.1 General
1.2 What is Procmail?
1.3 Abbreviations and thanks
1.4 Version information
1.5 Document layout and maintenance
1.6 About presented recipes
1.7 Variables used in recipes
1.8 About "useless use of cat award"
2.0 UBE in Internet
2.1 Terms used and foreword
2.2 UBE strategies
2.3 UBE and bouncing message back
2.4 UBE and "I don't mind" attitude
2.5 We need a law against UBE
3.0 Anti-UBE pointers
3.1 NoCEM, CAUCE and others
3.2 General Filtering pages (more than procmail)
3.3 Junk email and spam
3.4 Comprehensive list of spammers
3.5 Misc pointers
3.6 Questionable UBE stop services
3.7 UBE related newsgroups or mailing lists
3.8 Software: adcomplain -- Perl junk email rport
3.9 Software: Ricochet -- Perl junk email rport
3.10 Software: yell -- perl
3.11 Software: RBL lookup tool -- C
3.12 Software: mapSoN
3.13 Software: spamgard
3.14 Software: Spam Be Gone
3.15 Software: ifile - Perl
3.16 Software: ClearMail
4.0 Procmail pointers
4.1 Where to get procmail binary
4.2 Where is procmail developed
4.3 About procmail's Y2K compliance
4.4 Procmail mailing lists
4.5 Procmail recipe modules and faqs
4.6 Procmail mode for Emacs
4.7 Procmail module list
4.8 Where to get Procmail code and modules
4.9 Procmail code to filter UBE
5.0 Dry run testing
5.1 What is dry run testing
5.2 Why the From field is not okay after dry run
5.3 Getting default value of a procmail variable
6.0 Things to remember
6.1 Get the newest procmail
6.2 Csh's tilde is not supported
6.3 Be sure to write the recipe start right
6.4 Always set SHELL
6.5 Check and set PATH
6.6 Keep the log on all the time
6.7 Never add a trailing slash for directories
6.8 Remember what term DELIVERED means
6.9 Beware putting comment in wrong place
6.10 Brace placement
6.11 Local lockfile usage
6.12 Global lockfile
6.13 Gee, where do I put all those ! * $ ??
6.14 Sending automatic reply, use X-loop header
6.15 Avoid extra shell layer (check command for SHELLMETAS)
6.16 Think what shell commands you use
6.17 Using absolute path when calling a shell program
6.18 Disabling recipe temporarily
6.19 Keep message backup, no matter what
6.20 Order of the procmail recipes
7.0 Procmail flags
7.1 The order of the flags
7.2 Flag w and recipe with |
7.3 Flag w, lockfile and recipe with |
7.4 Flag f and w together
7.5 Flags h and b
7.6 Flag h and sinking to /dev/null
7.7 Flag i and pipe flag f
7.8 Flag r
7.9 Flag c's background
7.10 Flag c before nested block forks a child
7.11 Flag c and understanding possible forking penalty
7.12 Flags before nested block
7.13 Flags aAeE tutorial
8.0 Matching and regexps
8.1 Philosophy of abstraction in regexps
8.2 Matches are not case sensitive
8.3 Procmail uses multiline matches
8.4 Headers are folded before matching
8.5 Improving Space-Tab syndrome
8.6 Handling exclamation character
8.7 Rules for generating a character class
8.8 Matching space at the end of condition
8.9 Beware leading backslash
8.10 Correct use of TO Macro
8.11 Procmail's regexp engine
8.12 Procmail and egrep differences
8.13 Undesrtanding procmail's minimal matching (stingy vs. greedy)
8.14 Explaining \/ and ()\/
8.15 Explaning ^^ and ^
8.16 ANDing traditionally
8.17 ORing traditionally
8.18 ORing and score recipe
8.19 ORing by using De Morgan rules
9.0 Variables
9.1 Setting and unsetting variables
9.2 Variable initialisation and sh syntax
9.3 Testing variables
9.4 What does $\VAR mean?
9.5 Common pitfalls when using variables
9.6 Quoting: Using single or double quotes
9.7 Quoting: Passing values to an external program
9.8 Passing values from an external program
9.9 Incrementing a variable by a value N
9.10 Comparing values
9.11 Strings: How many characters are there in a given string?
9.12 Strings: How to strip trailing newline.
9.13 Strings: deriving the last N characters of a string.
9.14 Strings: Getting partial matches from a string.
9.15 Strings: Procmail string manipulation example
9.16 How to raise a flag if the message was filed
9.17 Dollar sign in condition lines.
9.18 Finding mysterious foo variable
9.19 Storing code to variable
9.20 Getting headers into a variable.
9.21 Converting value to lowercase
10.0 Suggestions and miscellaneous
10.1 Speeding up procmail
10.2 See the procmail installation's examples
10.3 Printing statistics of your incoming mail
10.4 Storing UBE mailboxes outside of quota
10.5 Using first 5-30 lines from the message
10.6 Using cat or echo in scripts?
10.7 How to run an extra shell command as a side effect?
10.8 Forcing "ok" return status from shell script
10.9 Make your own .procmailrc available to others
10.10 Using dates efficiently
10.11 Keep simple header log
10.12 Gzipping messages
10.13 Emergency stop for your .procmailrc
11.0 Scoring
11.1 Using scores by an example
11.2 Brief Score tutorial
11.3 Score's scope
11.4 Counting length of a string
11.5 Counting lines in a message (Adding Lines: header)
11.6 Determining if body is longer than header
11.7 Matching last Received header
11.8 How to add Content-Length header
11.9 Testing message size or number of lines
11.10 Counting commas with recursive includerc
12.0 Formail usage
12.1 Fetching fields with formail -x
12.2 Always use formail's -rt switch
12.3 Using -rt and rewriting the From address
12.4 Formail -rt and Resent-From header
12.5 Quoting the message
12.6 Without quoting the message
12.7 How to include headers and body to the reply message
12.8 Adding text to the beginning of message
12.9 Adding text to the end of message
12.10 How to truncate headers (save filing space)
12.11 Adding extra headers from file
12.12 Splitting digest
12.13 Mailbox: Splitting to individual files
12.14 Mailbox: Extracting all From addresses from mailbox
12.15 Mailbox: Applying procmail recipe on whole mailbox
12.16 Mailbox: run series of commands for each mail (split mailbox)
12.17 Option -D and cache
12.18 Option -D and message-id in the body
12.19 Reducing formail calls (conditionally adding fields)
12.20 Formail -A -a options
12.21 Formail -e -s options
13.0 Saving mailing list messages
13.1 Using subroutine pm-jalist.rc to detect mailing lists
13.2 Using plus addressing foo+bar@address.com
13.3 Using RFC comment trick for additional information
13.4 Simple mailing list handling
13.5 Archiving according to TO
13.6 Using Return-Path to detect mailing lists
14.0 Procmail, MIME and HTML
14.1 Mime Bibliography
14.2 Mime notes
14.3 Software to deal with mime or html
14.4 Mime content type application/ms-tnef
14.5 Trapping html mime messages
14.6 Complaining about html messages
14.7 Converting HTML body to plain text
14.8 Getting rid of unwanted mime attachments (html, vcard)
14.9 Sending contents of a html page in plain text to someone
15.0 Simple recipe examples
15.1 Saving: MH folders -- numbered messages
15.2 Saving: to monthly folders
15.3 Modifying: Filtering basics
15.4 Modifying: Squeezing empty lines around message body
15.5 Modifying: shuffling headers always to same order
15.6 Service: Auto answerer to empty messages
15.7 Service: File server -- send fileas as attachments upon request
15.8 Service: Ping responder
15.9 Service: simple vacation with procmail
15.10 Service: vacation code example
15.11 Service: Auto-forwarding
15.12 Service: forward only specific messages
15.13 Service: Making digests
15.14 Kill: killing advertisement headers and footers
15.15 Kill: simple killfile recipe with procmail
15.16 Kill: duplicate messages
15.17 Kill: spam filter with simple recipes
15.18 Kill: (un)subscribe messages
15.19 Time: Once a day cron-like job
15.20 Time: Running a recipe at a given time
15.21 Time: Triggering email and using cron
15.22 Decoding: Uudecode
15.23 Decoding: MIME
15.24 How to send commands in the message's body
15.25 Matching two words on a line, but not one
15.26 How to define personal XX macros?
15.27 How to change subject by body match
15.28 How to change Subject according to some other header
15.29 How to call program with parameters
16.0 Miscellaneous recipes
16.1 Matching valid Message-Id header
16.2 Sending two files in a message
16.3 Excessive quoting of message
16.4 Sending message to pager in chunks
16.5 Playing particular sound when message arrives
16.6 Combining multiple Original-Cc and Original-To headers
16.7 Forwarding sensitive messages in encrypted format
17.0 Procmail and PGP
17.1 Decrypt pgp messages automatically
17.2 Getkeys from keyserver
17.3 Auto grab incoming pgp keys
18.0 Includerc usage
18.1 Using: multiple rc files
18.2 Using: You can call rc file conditionally
18.3 Autoloading an rc file
18.4 Making: naming of the rc file
18.5 Making: Using namespace when saving procmail variables
18.6 Making: Public and private variables in rc file
18.7 The rules of thumb for constructing general purpose rc file
18.8 An includerc skeleton
19.0 Mailing list server
19.1 Mailing list server pointers
19.2 Simple Mailing list server
20.0 Common troubles
20.1 Procmail modes: normal, delivery, and mailfilter.
20.2 Procmail as sendmail Mlocal mail filtering device
20.3 Procmail doesn't pass 8bit characters
20.4 My ISP isn't very interested in installing procmail
20.5 My ISP has systemwide procmailrc; is this a good idea?
20.6 Procmail changes mailbox and directory permissions
20.7 Changing mbox permission during compilation to 660
20.8 The .forward file must be real file
20.9 Using .forward if procmail already is LDA
20.10 Mail should be put in the mailqueue if write fails
20.11 Qmail: how to make it work with procmail
20.12 Qmail: Procmail looks file from /var/spool/mail only
20.13 Qmail: patch to procmail 3.11pre7 to work with Maildirs
20.14 AFS: How to use Procmail when HOME is in AFS cell
20.15 Help, some idiot sent my address to 30 mailing lists
20.16 Help, Procmail beeps and prints to my console
20.17 Help, procmail dumps mail to console
20.18 Help, corrupted From_ line in mailbox
20.19 Directing user's mail to HOME instead of /var/spool/
20.20 NFS mounting /var/mail is a good way to get bad performance
20.21 I can't see the sendmail's response in LOGFILE
20.22 Compiling procmail and choosing locking scheme
20.23 Forwarding lot of mail causes heavy load
20.24 What happens to mail if MDA Procmail fails
20.25 Procmail reads entire 90Mb message into memory
20.26 Help, procmail uses occasionally huge chunk of memory
20.27 Procmail signalled out of memory in my verbose log
20.28 Variables DEFAULT and ORGMAIL
20.29 When DEFAULT cannot be mailed to
20.30 Variable DROPPRIVS
20.31 Variable HOME
20.32 Variable HOST
20.33 Variable LINEBUF
20.34 Variable LOG and LOGFILE
20.35 Variable TRAP
20.36 Variable UMASK
20.37 UMSAK and permissions
20.38 Performance difference between backtick and "|" recipe
20.39 Procmail's temporary file names while writing file out
20.40 Parameter $@
20.41 Procmail variables are null terminated (detecting null string)
20.42 FROM_DAEMON TO and TO_ and case-sensitiveness
20.43 TO_ macro deciphered
20.44 TO_ macro and RFC 822
20.45 FROM_DAEMON deciphered
21.0 Technical matters
21.1 List of exit codes
21.2 List of precedence codes
21.3 Sendmail and -t
21.4 RFC822 Reply-To and formail problem with multiple recipients
21.5 Procmail and IMAP server
21.6 Machine which processes mail
21.7 Compiling procmail and MAILSPOOLHOME
22.0 Smartlist
22.1 MLM RFC
22.2 Other mailing list software
22.3 SmartList code (mailing list implementation with procmail)
22.4 Installation trouble: getparams
22.5 Accepting mail only from users in whitelist(s)
23.0 Additional procmail or MUA software
23.1 Comstat to handle multiple mailboxes
23.2 Elm and pgp support (Mutt)
23.3 MH sites
24.0 Additional procmail software for Emacs
24.1 What is Emacs
24.2 Emacs and procmail mode and Lint
24.3 Emacs and lining up backslashes
24.4 Emacs and browsing mailbox files
24.5 Emacs and live-mode.el
24.6 Emacs and font-lock.el
25.0 Procmail, Emacs and Gnus
25.1 Gnus pointers
25.2 Why use procmail with Gnus
25.3 Setting up gnus for procmail - Basics
25.4 Gnus for procmail - More gnus
25.5 Emacs and Gnus -- Fiddling with spool files
25.6 Gnus and article snippets
25.7 Emacs GNUS - POP - Procmail
26.0 RFC, Request for comments
26.1 RFCs and their jurisdiction (munged Addresses)
26.2 Comments about addresses munging
26.3 RFC and valid email address characters
26.4 RFC and login-name@fdqn
26.5 RFCs and message's signature
26.6 RFC and using MIME in usenet newsgroups
26.7 Some RFC Pointers
27.0 Introduction to E-mail Headers
27.1 To find out more about email (Resources)
27.2 Lecture by Alan Stebbens
27.3 Applied to received messages
27.4 Bcc lecture by Alan Stebbens
27.5 Bcc lecture by Philip Guenther
28.0 Message's headers
28.1 What is correct From address syntax
28.2 What's that X-UIDL header?
28.3 What is that first From_ header?
28.4 Message-Id header
28.5 Received header
28.6 Return-Path
28.7 Errors-To
28.8 X-Subscription-Info
28.9 Reply-To header
28.10 Mail-Copies-To header
28.11 Mail-Followup-To and Reply-To-Personal headers
28.12 Content-Length header and From_ specification
28.13 Moral about CC copies in usenet
29.0 Other interesting code
29.1 Misc email related pointers
29.2 Expire mail pointers
29.3 Usenet News related pointers
29.4 Code: Perl Extract procmail man pages from 3.11pre7.tar.gz
29.5 Code: Sh remove matching lines from file
Table of contents
1.0 Document id
1.1 General
1.2 What is Procmail?
1.3 Abbreviations and thanks
1.4 Version information
1.5 Document layout and maintenance
1.6 About presented recipes
1.7 Variables used in recipes
1.8 About "useless use of cat award"
2.0 UBE in Internet
2.1 Terms used and foreword
2.2 UBE strategies
2.3 UBE and bouncing message back
2.4 UBE and "I don't mind" attitude
2.5 We need a law against UBE
3.0 Anti-UBE pointers
3.1 NoCEM, CAUCE and others
3.2 General Filtering pages (more than procmail)
3.3 Junk email and spam
3.4 Comprehensive list of spammers
3.5 Misc pointers
3.6 Questionable UBE stop services
3.7 UBE related newsgroups or mailing lists
3.8 Software: adcomplain -- Perl junk email rport
3.9 Software: Ricochet -- Perl junk email rport
3.10 Software: yell -- perl
3.11 Software: RBL lookup tool -- C
3.12 Software: mapSoN
3.13 Software: spamgard
3.14 Software: Spam Be Gone
3.15 Software: ifile - Perl
3.16 Software: ClearMail
4.0 Procmail pointers
4.1 Where to get procmail binary
4.2 Where is procmail developed
4.3 About procmail's Y2K compliance
4.4 Procmail mailing lists
4.5 Procmail recipe modules and faqs
4.6 Procmail mode for Emacs
4.7 Procmail module list
4.8 Where to get Procmail code and modules
4.9 Procmail code to filter UBE
5.0 Dry run testing
5.1 What is dry run testing
5.2 Why the From field is not okay after dry run
5.3 Getting default value of a procmail variable
6.0 Things to remember
6.1 Get the newest procmail
6.2 Csh's tilde is not supported
6.3 Be sure to write the recipe start right
6.4 Always set SHELL
6.5 Check and set PATH
6.6 Keep the log on all the time
6.7 Never add a trailing slash for directories
6.8 Remember what term DELIVERED means
6.9 Beware putting comment in wrong place
6.10 Brace placement
6.11 Local lockfile usage
6.12 Global lockfile
6.13 Gee, where do I put all those ! * $ ??
6.14 Sending automatic reply, use X-loop header
6.15 Avoid extra shell layer (check command for SHELLMETAS)
6.16 Think what shell commands you use
6.17 Using absolute path when calling a shell program
6.18 Disabling recipe temporarily
6.19 Keep message backup, no matter what
6.20 Order of the procmail recipes
7.0 Procmail flags
7.1 The order of the flags
7.2 Flag w and recipe with |
7.3 Flag w, lockfile and recipe with |
7.4 Flag f and w together
7.5 Flags h and b
7.6 Flag h and sinking to /dev/null
7.7 Flag i and pipe flag f
7.8 Flag r
7.9 Flag c's background
7.10 Flag c before nested block forks a child
7.11 Flag c and understanding possible forking penalty
7.12 Flags before nested block
7.13 Flags aAeE tutorial
8.0 Matching and regexps
8.1 Philosophy of abstraction in regexps
8.2 Matches are not case sensitive
8.3 Procmail uses multiline matches
8.4 Headers are folded before matching
8.5 Improving Space-Tab syndrome
8.6 Handling exclamation character
8.7 Rules for generating a character class
8.8 Matching space at the end of condition
8.9 Beware leading backslash
8.10 Correct use of TO Macro
8.11 Procmail's regexp engine
8.12 Procmail and egrep differences
8.13 Undesrtanding procmail's minimal matching (stingy vs. greedy)
8.14 Explaining \/ and ()\/
8.15 Explaning ^^ and ^
8.16 ANDing traditionally
8.17 ORing traditionally
8.18 ORing and score recipe
8.19 ORing by using De Morgan rules
9.0 Variables
9.1 Setting and unsetting variables
9.2 Variable initialisation and sh syntax
9.3 Testing variables
9.4 What does $\VAR mean?
9.5 Common pitfalls when using variables
9.6 Quoting: Using single or double quotes
9.7 Quoting: Passing values to an external program
9.8 Passing values from an external program
9.9 Incrementing a variable by a value N
9.10 Comparing values
9.11 Strings: How many characters are there in a given string?
9.12 Strings: How to strip trailing newline.
9.13 Strings: deriving the last N characters of a string.
9.14 Strings: Getting partial matches from a string.
9.15 Strings: Procmail string manipulation example
9.16 How to raise a flag if the message was filed
9.17 Dollar sign in condition lines.
9.18 Finding mysterious foo variable
9.19 Storing code to variable
9.20 Getting headers into a variable.
9.21 Converting value to lowercase
10.0 Suggestions and miscellaneous
10.1 Speeding up procmail
10.2 See the procmail installation's examples
10.3 Printing statistics of your incoming mail
10.4 Storing UBE mailboxes outside of quota
10.5 Using first 5-30 lines from the message
10.6 Using cat or echo in scripts?
10.7 How to run an extra shell command as a side effect?
10.8 Forcing "ok" return status from shell script
10.9 Make your own .procmailrc available to others
10.10 Using dates efficiently
10.11 Keep simple header log
10.12 Gzipping messages
10.13 Emergency stop for your .procmailrc
11.0 Scoring
11.1 Using scores by an example
11.2 Brief Score tutorial
11.3 Score's scope
11.4 Counting length of a string
11.5 Counting lines in a message (Adding Lines: header)
11.6 Determining if body is longer than header
11.7 Matching last Received header
11.8 How to add Content-Length header
11.9 Testing message size or number of lines
11.10 Counting commas with recursive includerc
12.0 Formail usage
12.1 Fetching fields with formail -x
12.2 Always use formail's -rt switch
12.3 Using -rt and rewriting the From address
12.4 Formail -rt and Resent-From header
12.5 Quoting the message
12.6 Without quoting the message
12.7 How to include headers and body to the reply message
12.8 Adding text to the beginning of message
12.9 Adding text to the end of message
12.10 How to truncate headers (save filing space)
12.11 Adding extra headers from file
12.12 Splitting digest
12.13 Mailbox: Splitting to individual files
12.14 Mailbox: Extracting all From addresses from mailbox
12.15 Mailbox: Applying procmail recipe on whole mailbox
12.16 Mailbox: run series of commands for each mail (split mailbox)
12.17 Option -D and cache
12.18 Option -D and message-id in the body
12.19 Reducing formail calls (conditionally adding fields)
12.20 Formail -A -a options
12.21 Formail -e -s options
13.0 Saving mailing list messages
13.1 Using subroutine pm-jalist.rc to detect mailing lists
13.2 Using plus addressing foo+bar@address.com
13.3 Using RFC comment trick for additional information
13.4 Simple mailing list handling
13.5 Archiving according to TO
13.6 Using Return-Path to detect mailing lists
14.0 Procmail, MIME and HTML
14.1 Mime Bibliography
14.2 Mime notes
14.3 Software to deal with mime or html
14.4 Mime content type application/ms-tnef
14.5 Trapping html mime messages
14.6 Complaining about html messages
14.7 Converting HTML body to plain text
14.8 Getting rid of unwanted mime attachments (html, vcard)
14.9 Sending contents of a html page in plain text to someone
15.0 Simple recipe examples
15.1 Saving: MH folders -- numbered messages
15.2 Saving: to monthly folders
15.3 Modifying: Filtering basics
15.4 Modifying: Squeezing empty lines around message body
15.5 Modifying: shuffling headers always to same order
15.6 Service: Auto answerer to empty messages
15.7 Service: File server -- send fileas as attachments upon request
15.8 Service: Ping responder
15.9 Service: simple vacation with procmail
15.10 Service: vacation code example
15.11 Service: Auto-forwarding
15.12 Service: forward only specific messages
15.13 Service: Making digests
15.14 Kill: killing advertisement headers and footers
15.15 Kill: simple killfile recipe with procmail
15.16 Kill: duplicate messages
15.17 Kill: spam filter with simple recipes
15.18 Kill: (un)subscribe messages
15.19 Time: Once a day cron-like job
15.20 Time: Running a recipe at a given time
15.21 Time: Triggering email and using cron
15.22 Decoding: Uudecode
15.23 Decoding: MIME
15.24 How to send commands in the message's body
15.25 Matching two words on a line, but not one
15.26 How to define personal XX macros?
15.27 How to change subject by body match
15.28 How to change Subject according to some other header
15.29 How to call program with parameters
16.0 Miscellaneous recipes
16.1 Matching valid Message-Id header
16.2 Sending two files in a message
16.3 Excessive quoting of message
16.4 Sending message to pager in chunks
16.5 Playing particular sound when message arrives
16.6 Combining multiple Original-Cc and Original-To headers
16.7 Forwarding sensitive messages in encrypted format
17.0 Procmail and PGP
17.1 Decrypt pgp messages automatically
17.2 Getkeys from keyserver
17.3 Auto grab incoming pgp keys
18.0 Includerc usage
18.1 Using: multiple rc files
18.2 Using: You can call rc file conditionally
18.3 Autoloading an rc file
18.4 Making: naming of the rc file
18.5 Making: Using namespace when saving procmail variables
18.6 Making: Public and private variables in rc file
18.7 The rules of thumb for constructing general purpose rc file
18.8 An includerc skeleton
19.0 Mailing list server
19.1 Mailing list server pointers
19.2 Simple Mailing list server
20.0 Common troubles
20.1 Procmail modes: normal, delivery, and mailfilter.
20.2 Procmail as sendmail Mlocal mail filtering device
20.3 Procmail doesn't pass 8bit characters
20.4 My ISP isn't very interested in installing procmail
20.5 My ISP has systemwide procmailrc; is this a good idea?
20.6 Procmail changes mailbox and directory permissions
20.7 Changing mbox permission during compilation to 660
20.8 The .forward file must be real file
20.9 Using .forward if procmail already is LDA
20.10 Mail should be put in the mailqueue if write fails
20.11 Qmail: how to make it work with procmail
20.12 Qmail: Procmail looks file from /var/spool/mail only
20.13 Qmail: patch to procmail 3.11pre7 to work with Maildirs
20.14 AFS: How to use Procmail when HOME is in AFS cell
20.15 Help, some idiot sent my address to 30 mailing lists
20.16 Help, Procmail beeps and prints to my console
20.17 Help, procmail dumps mail to console
20.18 Help, corrupted From_ line in mailbox
20.19 Directing user's mail to HOME instead of /var/spool/
20.20 NFS mounting /var/mail is a good way to get bad performance
20.21 I can't see the sendmail's response in LOGFILE
20.22 Compiling procmail and choosing locking scheme
20.23 Forwarding lot of mail causes heavy load
20.24 What happens to mail if MDA Procmail fails
20.25 Procmail reads entire 90Mb message into memory
20.26 Help, procmail uses occasionally huge chunk of memory
20.27 Procmail signalled out of memory in my verbose log
20.28 Variables DEFAULT and ORGMAIL
20.29 When DEFAULT cannot be mailed to
20.30 Variable DROPPRIVS
20.31 Variable HOME
20.32 Variable HOST
20.33 Variable LINEBUF
20.34 Variable LOG and LOGFILE
20.35 Variable TRAP
20.36 Variable UMASK
20.37 UMSAK and permissions
20.38 Performance difference between backtick and "|" recipe
20.39 Procmail's temporary file names while writing file out
20.40 Parameter $@
20.41 Procmail variables are null terminated (detecting null string)
20.42 FROM_DAEMON TO and TO_ and case-sensitiveness
20.43 TO_ macro deciphered
20.44 TO_ macro and RFC 822
20.45 FROM_DAEMON deciphered
21.0 Technical matters
21.1 List of exit codes
21.2 List of precedence codes
21.3 Sendmail and -t
21.4 RFC822 Reply-To and formail problem with multiple recipients
21.5 Procmail and IMAP server
21.6 Machine which processes mail
21.7 Compiling procmail and MAILSPOOLHOME
22.0 Smartlist
22.1 MLM RFC
22.2 Other mailing list software
22.3 SmartList code (mailing list implementation with procmail)
22.4 Installation trouble: getparams
22.5 Accepting mail only from users in whitelist(s)
23.0 Additional procmail or MUA software
23.1 Comstat to handle multiple mailboxes
23.2 Elm and pgp support (Mutt)
23.3 MH sites
24.0 Additional procmail software for Emacs
24.1 What is Emacs
24.2 Emacs and procmail mode and Lint
24.3 Emacs and lining up backslashes
24.4 Emacs and browsing mailbox files
24.5 Emacs and live-mode.el
24.6 Emacs and font-lock.el
25.0 Procmail, Emacs and Gnus
25.1 Gnus pointers
25.2 Why use procmail with Gnus
25.3 Setting up gnus for procmail - Basics
25.4 Gnus for procmail - More gnus
25.5 Emacs and Gnus -- Fiddling with spool files
25.6 Gnus and article snippets
25.7 Emacs GNUS - POP - Procmail
26.0 RFC, Request for comments
26.1 RFCs and their jurisdiction (munged Addresses)
26.2 Comments about addresses munging
26.3 RFC and valid email address characters
26.4 RFC and login-name@fdqn
26.5 RFCs and message's signature
26.6 RFC and using MIME in usenet newsgroups
26.7 Some RFC Pointers
27.0 Introduction to E-mail Headers
27.1 To find out more about email (Resources)
27.2 Lecture by Alan Stebbens
27.3 Applied to received messages
27.4 Bcc lecture by Alan Stebbens
27.5 Bcc lecture by Philip Guenther
28.0 Message's headers
28.1 What is correct From address syntax
28.2 What's that X-UIDL header?
28.3 What is that first From_ header?
28.4 Message-Id header
28.5 Received header
28.6 Return-Path
28.7 Errors-To
28.8 X-Subscription-Info
28.9 Reply-To header
28.10 Mail-Copies-To header
28.11 Mail-Followup-To and Reply-To-Personal headers
28.12 Content-Length header and From_ specification
28.13 Moral about CC copies in usenet
29.0 Other interesting code
29.1 Misc email related pointers
29.2 Expire mail pointers
29.3 Usenet News related pointers
29.4 Code: Perl Extract procmail man pages from 3.11pre7.tar.gz
29.5 Code: Sh remove matching lines from file
1.0 Document id
1.1 General
.@(#) $Id: pm-tips.txt,v 1.76 1999/11/10 13:55:12 Jari Aalto Exp $
.$Keywords: procmail sendmail formail mail UBE UCE spam filter $
.$URL: http://www.procmail.org/jari/ $
.$Contactid: $
.$FileServer: send mail to Contactid with subject "send help" $
.$UrlLinksLastChecked: 1999-04-30 $
.@(#) This is a procmail tips page: a collection of procmail recipes,
.@(#) instructions, howtos. The document also contains URL pointers to
.@(#) the procmail mailing list and sites that fight against Internet
.@(#) UBE. You will also find many other interesting subjects that
.@(#) discuss about internet email: headers, mime and RFCs. There is
.@(#) also lot of room dedicated to Emacs and Gnus, simply because
.@(#) those are the best tools you find from Unix to deal with your
.@(#) mail and news reading. And I happen to know Emacs quite well.
.@(#) The tips are compiled from the procmail discussion list,
.@(#) from comp.mail.misc and from the author's own experiences with
.@(#) procmail.
This document does not intend to teach you the basics of procmail;
instead you have to be familiar with the procmail man pages
already. You may want to read *Nancy's* and *Era's* procmail faq
pages before this page. Especially Era's link page contains an
excellent collection of useful procmail links and pointers to unix
programs that deal with email (eg. Perl *MHonArc* Email hyperarchiver
at http://www.oac.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/mhonarc.html). If you find
errors or things to improve in this document, please go ahead and
send mail to [jari].
Author's homepage is behind these redirections links. Please keep these
in your bookmark list, not the absolute addresses, because the sutes may
move. These link should point always to the correct location:
http://poboxes.com/jari.aalto/ eg. homepage.html
http://home.eu.org/~jari/
If you want to have automatic notification whenever this page changes,
please visit the link below. To get nicely formatted netmind messages,
see procmail module `pm-janetmind.rc'.
http://minder.netmind.com/
If a mentioned URL is not alive, you may still be able to
successfully find it using the ftp search located at
http://ftpsearch.ntnu.no/
1.2 What is Procmail?
[faq] Procmail is a mail processing utility, which can help you
filter your mail, sort incoming mail according to sender, Subject
line, length of message, keywords in the message, etc, implement an
ftp-by-mail server, and much more. Procmail is also a complete
drop-in replacement for your MDA. (If this doesn't mean anything to
you, you may not want to know.)
Procmail runs under Unix. See Infinite Ink's Mail Filtering and
Robots page for information about related utilities for various other
platforms, and competing Unix programs, too (there aren't that many
of either).
1.3 Abbreviations and thanks
People and documents, abbreviations referred to, tokens used,
are in no particular order.
[stephen] Stephen R. van den Berg, Author of Procmail Last heard
from stephen 1997-08 in procmail mailing list by using address
. Later 1998 due to his regular work activities and
lack of time he nominated Philip Guenther to the head of Procmail
development.
.[aaron] Aaron Schrab
.[alan] Alan K. Stebbens
.[dan] Daniel Smith
.[david] David W. Tamkin
.[ed] Edward J. Sabol
.[elijah] Eli the Bearded
.[hal] Hal Wine
.[jari] Jari Aalto
.[philip] Philip Guenther
.[richard] Richard Kabel
.[sean] Sean B. Straw
.[timothy] Timothy J Luoma
.[walter] Walter Dnes
.[faq] Procmail FAQ j1era+pr@iki.fi
.[manual] Quote from some procmail manual page
o PM-L, Procmail mailing list
o FAQ-L, Faq Maintainers mailing list
http://www.landfield.com/faq-maintainers/faq-server/
http://lists.consensus.com/scripts/lyris.pl?visit=faq-maintainers
http://www.qucis.queensu.ca/FAQs/FAQaid/
o DING-L, Emacs Gnus mail/newsreader mailing list (ding).
http://www.gnus.org/
o <> Text has been rephrased or something was added which
does not exist in original message.
I also thank following people
o Era Eriksson proof read the v1.12 and sent corrections.
o Karl E. Vogel
sent numerous new anti-spam links to be added to the document.
o John Gianni send some nice recipes: one is now
in the procmail module list and the other ideas I have added to
this tips file.
o Tim Potter had a spare moment with v1.27 and
sent lot of spelling corrections. Thank you.
o took 1.48 and sent a huge
55k patch to correct many English language typos. Thank you
very much Guido.
o 1998-10-28 Richard Kabel sent massive patch
to correct language and provided excellent improvement comments.
o 1999-01-08 Steven Alexander thought that
a small perl script would help me to fix spelling mistakes more
easily. The script has been much better correction program that
simple patches. Thank you.
o 1999-06-16 Mark Seiden Did a enermous work to
proofread the v1.74. He sent a massive 105k with many editorial
corrections. My wholeheart thanks to you Mark.
1.4 Version information
Here is version and file size log of the text file, which gives you
some estimate how often you should update your copy.
v1.01 1997-09-13 46 (k)
v1.05 1997-09-14 53
v1.5 1997-09-16 76
v1.6 1997-09-18 94
v1.8 1997-10-01 127
v1.9 1997-10-11 142
v1.10 1997-10-13 181 archive file 1995-10's tips included
v1.13 1997-11-08 218 Era's correction suggestions.
v1.14 1997-11-25 260
v1.17 1997-12-09 343 up till archive 1996-07 now included
v1.24 1997-12-30 415 up till 1996-12 is now included
v1.29 1998-01-30 429 "regexp" section rewrite.
v1.31 1998-03-10 469 Better ordering: ORing rules discussed
v1.32 1998-03-23 471 All recipes checked (by eye)
v1.34 1998-04-02 488 ORing and supreme scoring added
v1.36 1998-04-03 493 Includerc rewritten, plus addressing
v1.41 1998-06-17 510 How to disable recipe quickly with
v1.44 1998-06-19 516 Detecting mailing lists with pm-jalist.rc
v1.45 1998-06-23 521 All recipes checked by eye. Many fixes.
v1.46 1998-06-24 526 Added live urls to procmail archive
v1.49 1998-08-10 529 Guido.Van.Hoeck's 55k patch applied
v1.51 1998-08-18 541 Small changes. MIME notes
v1.52 1998-08-24 553 Flag c forking study, procmail wish list
v1.53 1998-08-24 554 Procmail doesn't pass 8bit characters
v1.55 1998-08-29 565 Fetching fields with formail -x
v1.57 1998-10-06 575 PLUS addr. Convert HTML body to text
v1.58 1998-10-12 583 SmartList and other MLM software discussed
v1.60 1998-10-21 591 UMASK, .forward if procmail already is LDA
v1.63 1998-10-30 595 Richard's english correction patch
v1.64 1998-11-26 602 More Richard's comments integrated
v1.66 1998-12-14 578 Philip took care of bugs/patches listing
v1.67 1998-01-07 579 Eli's procmail recipes in module section
v1.68 1998-01-29 587 Added "Lua" language pointer
v1.69 1999-02-23 590 RFC and using MIME in usenet postings
v1.70 1999-02-26 592 procmail's Y2K compliance
v1.71 1999-03-29 597 Ricochet -- Perl script to fight UBE
v1.72 1999-04-21 597 Links corrected
v1.74 1999-04-26 599 document moved to www.procmail.org
v2.0 1999-10-01 602k Mark Seiden's patch applied. Now under CVS.
1.5 Document layout and maintenance
This document is maintained in plain text format with Emacs and my
text formatting package *tinytf.el* (automatic TOC and indentation
control). Funny marks or indentation are in the text
version so that the Perl text-to-html
filter `t2html.pl' can be used. See more about this at:
http://poboxes.com/jari.aalto/t2html.html
Text version of this file was converted into HTML with command:
% perl5.004_04 t2html.pl \
--html-frame \
--title "Procmail tips page" \
--author "Jari Aalto" \
--email jari.aalto@poboxes.com \
--meta-keywords "procmail, sendmail, mail, filter, faq, ube" \
--meta-description "Procmail tips page" \
--base http://www.procmail.org/jari \
--document http://www.procmail.org/jari \
--url http://www.procmail.org/jari \
--html-body LANG=en \
--Out \
pm-tips.txt
Please also familiarise yourself with unix what(1) and GNU RCS
ident(1), if you have those commands in your system. It is
important that you mark interesting text to these tools so that
someone can get an overview of your supplied files
% what FILES - Print @( # ) tags
% ident FILES - Print $ $ keywords
Sending improvements
Because I'm not English speaking, I regret the bad language I may have
used in this document. If you have any time, 5-10 minutes to find some
spelling mistake or misuse of the English verbs, please go ahead and
send me a patch to correct the wording. The preferred way to send
corrections to this document is as diff(1) output. Here's how to make
corrections send them to me:
The diff option -u is only available in GNU diff, please try to
send the -u diff if possible. If you don't have -u option, use -c
switch.
% cp pm-tips.txt pm-tips.txt.orig
... load the pm-tips.txt to your text editor
... edit the file and save
... Print the version number first
% what pm-tips.txt > pm-tips.txt.diff # see man what(1)
% diff -u -bw pm-tips.txt.orig pm-tips.txt >> pm-tips.txt.diff
...Send content of pm-tips.txt.diff to document maintainer.
1.6 About presented recipes
The recipes presented here are collected from the net and procmail
archives. I have tried my best to keep the recipes as original as
possible, but I have generalised the examples when necessary. If
some recipe doesn't work as announced, please a) send note to
[jari] b) send email to procmail mailing list and ask how to
correct it. I will watch the procmail list and I'll replace any
faulty recipe with correct one.
Sometimes I have taken the liberty to use a simple dot(.) in
regular expressions, where the right, pedantic way would have
been to use an escaped dot. If you want to be very strict, you
should use the escaped dot where applicable.
[free hand version] [pedantic version]
:0 :0
* match.this.site * match\.this\.site
Procmail also accepts assignments without quotes, like this:
var = value
num = 1
dir = /var/mail
But I have adopted a style, where literal strings are assigned with
double quotes:
var = "value"
because the procmail code checker then won't warn you about missing
dollar-sign, which you might have very well forgotten. Emacs fon-lock,
a syntax highlighting package also displays double quoted string
in color.
# If you do this...
var = value
# then it is in fact not clear what was intended:
var = "value" # Did you mean: literal assignment?
var = $value # Did you mean: variable assignment?
Recipe flags are also _not_ stuck together, because for me the
visual distinction of `:0' and `flags' is a valuable one.
[Erm, all stuck] [I like this better]
:0ABDc: :0 A BDc:
1.7 Variables used in recipes
These are part of the procmail module *pm-javar.rc* and are used in
recipes.
# Pure newline; typical usage: LOG = "$NL message $NL"
NL = "
"
Refer to "improving Space-Tab syndrome" section for more details
WSPC = " " # whitespace: space + tab
SPC = "[$WSPC]" # Regexp: space + tab
SPCL = "($SPC|$)" # whitespace + linefeed: spc/tab/nl
NSPC = "[^$WSPC]" # negation
s = $SPC # shortname: like perl -- \s
d = "[0-9]" # A digit -- Perl \d
w = "[0-9a-z_A-Z]" # A word -- Perl \w
W = "[^0-9a-z_A-Z]" # A word -- Perl \W
a = "[a-zA-Z]" # A word, only alphabetic chars
Writing recipes is now a little easier and may look more clear.
*$ Header:$s+$d+$s+$d # Matches "Header: 11 12"
_SUPREME_ = 9876543210, is the highest score value that causes
procmail to bail out. [david] Actually the maximum is 2147483647,
but 9876543210 is easier to remember/type and will function just as
well.
_PMSRC_ = Procmail includerc code directory, where *rc files
reside. Anywhere you want it to be: usually $HOME/pm or
$HOME/.procmail. Here you keep the procmail files, logfiles and
includerc scripts. You can also use the synonym _PMDIR_.
_SPOOL_ = Directory where your procmail delivers the categorized
messages. Like mailing lists:
list.procmail, list.lyx-users, list.emacs, list.elm
and work mail:
work.announcements, work.lab, work.doc, work.customer
and your private message:
mail.usenet, mail.private, mail.default, mail.perl
and unimportant messages
junk.daemon, junk.cron, junk.ube
If you read the procmail-delivered files directly, this directory
is usually $HOME/Mail or $HOME/mail. If you use some other software
that reads these files as mail spool files (like Emacs Gnus), then
this directory is typically ~/Mail/spool/ or similar.
_MY_XLOOP_ = Used to prevent resending messages that have already
been handled. Typically `$LOGNAME@$HOST', but this can be any user
chosen string. Make it it unique to your address. In this document
the definition is:
MY_XLOOP = "X-Loop: $LOGNAME@$HOST"
_SENDMAIL_ = Program to deliver composed mail. Usually standard
Unix `sendmail', but it must have some switches with it. See man
page for more. We use following definition in scripts:
SENDMAIL = "sendmail -oi -t"
_NICE_ = In a Unix environment you can lower the scheduling priority
wth nice(1). If you are conscious of how many external processes you
launch for each piece of mail it would be nice to lower the
priority of such processes. You may see in this tips file that
external processes are called with `NICE' enabled:
:0 w # same as nice -10 script.pls
| $NICE script.pl
_IS_ functions; eg. IS_EXIST is defined as "test -e" and so on.
The definition of _IS_ functions are system-dependent.
E.g. On Irix the "-e" option is not recognized and
the nearest equivalent is "test -r". All _IS_ functions
are defined in the `pm-javar.rc' module.
1.8 About "useless use of cat award"
Randal Schwartz, a well-known Perl programmer and Perl book writer,
started giving emmy rewards for the "useless use of cat command"
whenever someone wrote examples without token "<". Like this:
% cat file.name.this | wc -l
Instead he insisted that the call should have been written like this,
which saves the pipe. (Never mind that `wc' can read the file
directly; this is an example.)
% wc -l < file.name.this
I stick my opinion in this soup and you're free to disagree. When
you see the shell commands used in this document, they are written
so that they can be read from left to right: The "<" is in my
opinion difficult to understand. As an example, I think that:
% cmd1 < file1 | cmd2 > file2
is less clear than my preferred way of writing such commands:
% cat file1 | cmd1 | cmd2 > file2
And now to the purist side: Is saving one pipe process so important?
Let me see, I use a 2Meg file in this test:
% time sh -c "cat some-file-name-is-here | time wc -l"
0.29u 0.11s 0:00.47 85.1%
% time sh -c "wc -l < some-file-name-is-here"
0.27u 0.05s 0:00.39 82.0%
There is not much difference, and this 2Meg file is not typical at
all. The files typically used are many times smaller. The nitpicking is
therefore pointless. Another reason why I use "left to right
pipe writing": when you recall the command in csh, you can edit the
last command's arguments easily. If you used the "<" token, tapping
keyboard is _much_ more tedious (try changing wc command's option
above). Oh yeah, you can write like this to get the command to the
right, but that's even more obscure.
% < some-file-name-is-here wc -l
Dallman Ross also mentioned that csh users can
replace any word in the previous command by use of caret(^) editing
commands, like this:
% cat some-file-name-is-here | time wc -l
% ^some-file-name-is-here^new-file^
--> cat new-file | time wc -l
Ahem, so there, I got it off my chest...
2.0 UBE in Internet
2.1 Terms used and foreword
[Part of this has been excerpted from the Email Abuse Faq]
._UBE_ = Unsolicited Bulk Email
._UCE_ = (subset of UBE) Unsolicited Commercial Email
_Spam_ = Spam describes a particular kind of Usenet posting (and
canned spiced ham), but is now often used to describe many kinds of
inappropriate activities, including some email-related events. It
is technically incorrect to use "spam" to describe email abuse,
although attempting to correct the practice would amount to tilting
at windmills.
_Spam_ = definition by Erik Beckjord. "Some people decide that Spam
is anything you decide you want to ban if you can't handle the
intellectual load on a list." Remember, not to be confused with
real spam, which is unwanted bulk mail.
People are nowadays seeking a cure which will stop
or handle UBE. That can be easily done with procmail (under your
control) and with sendmail (by your sysadm). In order to select the
right strategy against UBE messages, you should read this section
and then decide how you will be using your procmail to deal with it.
2.2 UBE strategies
[Excerpted from the Email Abuse Faq]
4g. I asked to be "removed" - guess what? I got another U*E
Not surprisingly, many UBE outfits treat a "remove" request as
evidence that the address is "live"; a "remove" request to some
bulk emailers will actually guarantee that they will send more to
you. For many others, the remove procedure does not work, either by
chance or design. At this point perhaps you're starting to get a
feel for the type of people with whom you are dealing.
Also, getting removed doesn't keep you from being added the next
time they mine for addresses, nor will it get you off other copies
of the list that have been sold or traded to others. In summary,
there is no evidence of "remove" requests being an effective way to
stop UBE.
4h. I asked to be "removed" - guess what? The message bounced
Probably the remove procedure was false. Any remove procedure that
tells you to send remove requests to AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy,
Hotmail, or Juno is certainly false. The bulk emailers are an
unpopular lot; they forge headers, inject messages into open SMTP
ports, use temporary accounts, and pull other stunts to avoid the
tirade of complaints that follow every mailing.
2.3 UBE and bouncing message back
Has anyone found that bouncing spam does any good at all?
_Note:_ There are several program packages out there that
can with a high degree of success (but not 100%) trace back a
spam even if some headers are faked. This will not help you against
spam houses (which don't care) but will speed you telling
the sysadmins of an open relay. Such tools need human interaction for
proper working. See pointers to them in this document later.
Examine the messages by hand first and feed them to automatic
complain script. See pointers in this document later.
[sean] I had a whole policy message written up that would be sent
out to spammers. Nothing but a waste of my resources. Most return
paths are either completely bogus, or end up bouncing pretty damn
soon after the spam, which just brings you more junk to deal with.
Instead, I choose to send messages occasionally to administrators
and upline providers of domains which spew. "Agreement by action"
is one of the legal standards I like to use (for "should you
continue to send mail to me, that constitutes acceptance of the
terms herein").
InterNIC recently 1997-07 removed the root files for .com, .org,
and .net (I think) from access at their ftp server. Too many
spammers were using them for the purpose of generating mailing
lists. Access to the files now requires an assigned FTP account
from InterNIC. When I get a domain-style spam, I immediately do a
whois to get DNS info on the domain, then grep the root files to
obtain a list of domains serviced by the same DNS. If they appear
spammy (as spam domains tend to), I add these to a list of domains
to filter (egrep) in my primary domain-based ruleset. Works for
me, though the list is getting big.
[Kimmo Jaskari ] Another good reason is
that all those bounces, which get ignored by the spammer/recipient
anyway, still take up needless bandwith on the net. The spam is bad
enough for that, bouncing it back with some more stuff added is just
plain silly. You become part of the problem rather than the solution.
If the bounce even gets to the spammer, the spammer drops it on the
floor unseen.
[1998-11-03 PM-L Mark Shaw ] Jari:
"Autoresponder is bad idea. You need more better heuristics than
what procmail can do. The UBE messages really need human
inspection before you send them out, otherwise you may have to
apologise from lot of people eg if the complaint was mistakenly
sent off to some mailing list or wrong address." Mark: Having
originally set up my anti-spam recipes to be autoresponders, I
absolutely agree with this. I recall one morning when my strongly-
worded no-spam message went out to *everyone* who sent me email for
several hours..... *** shudder ***
2.4 UBE and "I don't mind" attitude
...whenever you see a spam you don't want, hit the delete key and
move on. Grow up and get a life, folks. The spams just don't
bother me. Why the hell does everyone have to go up in arms
everytime someone sends a spam? Spams are harmless! Spams even
sometime are interesting and/or useful!
[Responses from thread in procmail mailing list 1995-10 to
"FREE 1 yr. Magazine" spam.]
[Soren Dayton ]
The simplest reason against UBE is that it is rude. It costs some
people money to get email on some commercial services. This is
fundamentally different than junk snail mail for this reason and
too much spam can prevent people from getting mail (mailboxes can
fill up). So it is both an intrusion into my life _and_ it can
conceivably end in me either loosing money or loosing mail (which is
far more important). It is a burden on the receiver _far_ beyond
just hitting the delete key.
[Mark Seiden ]
people who are able to monitor the incoming machines of one of the
larger online services (like me) can see a sizeable increase in
system load average and volume directly resulting from spams. this
competition for fixed resources inevitably translates to reduced
service for "first class" mail.
It is impossible to engineer a mail system that can cope with an
unlimited amount of abuse. this is in addition to the difficulties
of doing so on a fixed price economic model, and the difficulties
of keeping up with the successful rapid expansion of the population
to be served.
Even if you, an individual, aren't charged anything per piece of
mail, there are costs borne by your service provider per piece of
mail, and these are *somehow* passed on to you. (They've calculated
an average across their entire user population to come up with a
"monthly cost of Internet mail".)
Spamsters and bulk mailers are not at all concerned about
efficiency. as proof of that, many of them are not even courteous
enough to supply a proper return address, so they can prune their
lists of undeliverable mail. all they care about is getting their
message across without their paying anything whatsoever for that
service.
Watch how this will inevitably translate into increased costs for
you, the consumer, unless we change the mechanisms by which bulk
mail is delivered as well as putting an appropriate economic model
in place.
[Steve Simmons ]
If you tolerate spamming, it will only get worse. Spamming has been
stopped again and again. Almost without exception, the spammers
have been tracked down and, via one means or another, have been
convinced to stop spamming.
Spams are harmless? I've already seen the 'Magazine Sub' message
10 or 12 times. I have a low bandwidth line. If I continue to
tolerate spamming, I will pay a very real penalty in performance as
tens, then thousands of spammers do it. Not to mention the
personal time involved in taking care of the crap.
Don't think that the time involved is significant? Just wait. My
wife and I are fairly generous with our time and money. As a
result, we were getting an average of five telephone calls *per
night* asking for money for various causes. A year ago, I adopted
a new policy -- I will not under any circumstances give money to a
caller, and will only consider it upon written solicitation. I
ask them to put me on their `do not call list'. If they do
*anything else* to continue the conversation, I hang up on them.
My wife opposed this, and we agreed to disagree -- if they ask for
her, they get her. If they ask for me, they get my speech. After
a year, she is getting 2-3 calls per night and I'm getting one or
two a week.
My point here is that individual action *does* get re-action from
the mailers. For them, I copy their internet providers on my
complaints and call their Better Business Bureau. It works.
If one does this politely and consistently, 98% of the spammers
will stop. The remaining 2% will discover that they're in a
different world from direct mail or telephone solicitation. Their
mailboxes will be overloaded with complaints (when it takes a
single keystroke to invoke your complain macro, you're very likely
to complain). Then their suppliers mailboxes will be overloaded
with complaints. The free magazine folks, who've been hiding
behind false ids and forging mail, will find that they're on the
wrong side of the law. I'm considering contacting their local
legal officials and urging them to investigate, because it sure
looks like fraud to me (read `Consumer Reports' for a similar case
by surface mail). Should a few more like this come in, I *will*
contact their legal authorities. We have their fax number; it's
all we need to find them.
[Carl Payne ]
Um, I don't know about you or anyone else here, but this cutesy,
"it's-okay-by-me" spam has been circulated under half a dozen
different user names and "domains" on as many mailing lists. It's
obvious to me the sender is trying to make people pissed off--how
can he possibly think someone will buy that crap, and why does he
think it's okay to send 19 and 20K files over a billion groups?
AFAIC, it has to stop. Now. I'm tired of the spam, I'm tired of
the "Who cares" attitude about spam, I'm tired of ISPs letting
people spam, I'm tired of the jetwash of spam, and I'm tired of the
bleedinghearts that say, "Golly, just ignore it, and it'll go
away."
I've got news for you all: when this method of spamming becomes the
preferred method of "marketing" on the internet, and people like us
are the bad guys because we're not allowing such litter to fly
across the fiber, you will care. You will say something, most
probably, "Why didn't we do something about this sooner?"
The guy in the next cube from you, who's paying a per-message
charge through his ISP, is probably going, "Dammit, over three
dollars this month on mail I've itemized as being spam." While
that doesn't seem like a lot, I revert to my earlier statement: if
this becomes the preferred method, his bill (and yours) will go up,
and everyone will wonder why it's too out of control to do anything
about.
Spam has the letters *m-a-s* in it, which en Espanol, means "more."
I say no. Not only no, but hell no. And, I refuse to be told that
my thinking is out of line just because I don't want my mailbox
flooded. Do something now. Do anything now. But, don't be quiet
and listen to anything that sounds like an endorsement of litter
[Wolfgang Weisselberg ]
Worse is that it costs a spammer very little to spam, say, 2
million addresses with 5KB:
o 5 hours unattended time online
o phone costs
o a 'free x hours'-CD or a provider looking the othher way i.e.
something between $0 and $500 (an expensive provider)
It costs all recipients:
o on an average of 5 seconds per UCE to decide that, indeed, it
is one: 115.7 *DAYS* (2777.8 hours) of mailchecking (at $7.5/h
that is just $20833 --- excluding all taxes and so on!)
o 379.5 hours (15.8 days) download time (multiply with your local
phone costs and remember that in most places even in-city calls
cost by the minute)
o the same time as online time (multiply by your provider costs)
o indirect costs (more HDs for the provider (9.5 GB), faster
connections for all the spams, more transmission costs (9.5
GB), faster machines, ...
I can send you the complete calculation if you like :-)
Now, if UCE becomes more common ... how many businesses are
connected to the Internet? Say that every business spamms once
every 10 years, and that they are well distributed over the time.
Number_of_businesses / 3650 = UCE's iniciated per day
UCE's iniciated per day * 2_000_000 (or more)
/ number of email addresses
= UCEs in your mailbox
Guess we are going to need T1's to just get all our mail. And a few
100 secretaries as well. Wave good-bye to usable email.
2.5 We need a law against UBE
Ray Everett-Church , Attorney/Online Consultant
Co-Founder & Congressional Liaison Coalition Against Unsolicited
Commercial Email; article 1997-12 in remailer politics mailing
list
In developing what eventually became the Smith Bill, CAUCE
discussed this rather extensively among our drafting committee. The
bill gives a cause of action against the advertiser, not any of the
pathways taken between you and them. This is consistent with the
interpretation of the fax law (and many other laws for that matter)
wherein the advertiser -- not the advertiser's agent -- is
responsible for the act committed.
As for the single UCE versus bulk issue, the general consensus has
been that while a single piece of spam does not do much damage, it
is fundamentally no less a cost shift than 10 identical messages,
or 100, or 1000, or a million. The only difference is that the
costs being shifted are greater and greater. We discussed many cut
off points... would 50 spams be acceptable? 25? 10? One really well
crafted, hand written, heartfelt and personalized spam be
permissible? And in the end we felt like we were discussion angels
on the heads of pins.
While virtually nobody's system will crash because of one piece of
spam (although George Nemeyer had trouble with three or four pieces
as I recall), what is the ultimate difference if you only get one
piece from each of 15 different advertisers a day? If one spam is
ok, but two are bad, what is the interval... a day, a week?
Enforcement depends on knowing when the threshold is crossed.
So here's a scenario: you receive three spams from what is,
unbeknownst to you, the same person (one advertising weightloss
pills from WeightLoss Associates at PO Box 1, one for an MLM from
MLM Company at PO Box 2, and Bee Pollen from Pollen Partnership at
PO Box 3). Each were individually crafted and appeared to be mailed
only to you.
Under the scenario above, if the law permits one spam, will you
sue?
Would you risk suing one or all of them, gambling that they sent
the spam to anyone other than you (or whatever the threshold is...
10, 25, 50)? Would you risk suing one or all of them on the chance
that they were somehow related? What if there was a chance that
you'd find out that the three companies were really different? What
if you did sue and found that they were owned by the same person,
but were legally organized separate entities and were therefore
each entitled to one spam a piece?
In short... if one spam is permitted, it could make enforcement
incredibly cumbersome, difficult and unlikely, and would present
spammers with many reasons to violate the law knowing the odds of a
suit and successful enforcement are greatly reduced. While bulk
spam is really bad on many levels, whether it's parsed out in very
small volumes makes little or no difference to the ultimate
recipients as far as the diminished utility, cost, and annoyance.
We need a clear, bright line. And the Smith Bill is that.
3.0 Anti-UBE pointers
3.1 NoCEM, CAUCE and others
"NoCEM"
http://www.cm.org/
"Dougal's NoCeM-E"
http://advicom.net/~dougal/antispam/
... Dougal is sysadm for an ISP. His page has wealth of information
about Anti-SPAM Tools. You also find his mailing list for NoCeM-E.
"The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE)"
http://www.cauce.org/faq.html
...The Problem: Unsolicited commercial email, more commonly known as
"spam", is a growing problem on the Internet. If you've used the
Internet for any length of time, you've probably received
solicitations via email to purchase products or services.
A Solution: A group of Internet users who are fed up with spam have
formed a coalition whose purpose is to amend 47 USC 227, the
section of U.S. law that bans "junk faxing", so that it will cover
electronic mail as well.
"Teergrubing against Spam"
http://www.iks-jena.de/mitarb/lutz/usenet/teergrube.en.html
...`Teergrubing' It's German and means Tar-Pit. Once you have been
stuck you can't get out. ...slow down internet connections in order
to stop UBE abuse. Several hundred teergrubes are able to block
spamming worldwide without blocking any e-mail. How do I start: If
you are the admin of a MX host, install a teergrube.
"Obtuse smtpd for UNIX"
http://www.obtuse.com/smtpd.html
Main (configurable) features:
o deny unauthorized relay (no more relay rape!)
o permit selective relay exceptions (eg. UUCP downstream)
o regex() filtering [block those spamming dialins!]
o deny access for no MX, no PTR, etc.
o defeat % hack
o support MAPS, ORBS, DUL, IMRSS, etc RBLs plus your local RBL
o support exception list for domains for which you will accept mail
o support selective tarpit'ing on refused connections
o individually configurable rejection messages
o precedence and override ordering
o informative log summary scripts
"Lot of good articles about spam"
http://www.sun.com/sunworldonline/swol-12-1997/swol-12-spam.html
"(anti-spam Law) US Representative Chris Smith's statement on junk
e-mail"
http://www.sun.com/sunworldonline/swol-08-1997/swol-08-junkemail.html
...considerable variation in the approaches at the federal level,
and state legislation varies widely as well. Professor David Sorkin
of John Marshall Law School, who summarized and provided links to
the major spam-related lawsuits noted above, also provides status
summaries and links to state and federal legislation
"Select email court cases -- Lots of them"
http://www.jmls.edu/cyber/cases/spam.html
America Online, Inc. v. Cyber Promotions, Inc.,
Compuserve Inc. v. Cyber Promotions, Inc., etc.
"Anti-Spam Directory of Information and Resources"
http://www.ao.net/waytosuccess/nospam.html
"Forum for Responsible and Ethical E-mail (FREE)"
http://www.ybecker.net/
"Ethical Marketing Using FREE Resources"
http://www.ao.net/waytosuccess/index.html
3.2 General Filtering pages (more than procmail)
"Nancy McGough - Mail Filtering FAQ"
http://ssil.uoregon.edu/~trenton/autopage/page7547.html
http://www.ii.com/internet/faqs/launchers/mail/filtering-faq/
"Information Filtering Resources"
http://www.ee.umd.edu/medlab/filter/ Doug Oard
...This page lists all known internet-accessible information
filtering resources.
3.3 Junk email and spam
"Spam FAQ"
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/alt.spam/
http://www.cs.ruu.nl/wais/html/na-dir/net-abuse-faq/spam-faq.html
"The email abuse FAQ"
http://members.aol.com/emailfaq/emailfaq.html
What is UBE, UCE, EMP, MMF, MLM, Spam, it is all explained here.
"Get that spammer -- A VERY GOOD LINK"
http://kryten.eng.monash.edu.au/gspam.html
...All about Spam; traceroute, netabuse etc. Full of links and docs
"Whois"
http://www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois/
"Advertising on Usenet: How To Do It, How Not To Do It"
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/advertising/
"Dealing with Junk Email"
http://www.mcs.com/~jcr/junkemaildeal.html
...What you should do (and not do) when you have been victimized by
a junk emailer. This document teaches you how to read headers in
order to trace the origin of junk email, and includes detailed
examples to show you how it is done. Headers are designed for
computers to read, not people, so they can be a little hard to
follow. Therefore, I hereby grant permission to print or
electronically save a copy of this page on your local machine for
your personal use while tracing junk email. Please check back for
updates and corrections, though.
o What Not To Do: Stuff that doesn't work
o What to do: effective techniques, including how to trace junk
email back to its source
o Stay Calm (take a deep breath...)
o Stay Mad (don't get discouraged)
o How to identify the sender and who gives them Internet access
o Who to complain to, abuse addresses, online services
o What to say and how to say it, effective complaining
"How to fight back."
http://www.oeonline.com/~edog/spamstop.html
. Look at the header of the advertising message. Find the
"Message-ID" line. (You might have to tell your e-mail program to
display this.)
. The words after the @ sign are the sender's real--not
faked--Internet Service Provider, or ISP. (Spammers often try to
disguise their address, but the Message-ID is a good clue.)
. Write a complaint to the postmaster of that ISP, similar to the
one below. (If the ISP is junkmail.com, then let
postmaster@junkmail.com hear from you.)
"Practical Tools to Boycott Spam"
http://spam.abuse.net/spam/
...We have been actively engaged in fighting spam for years. Recent
events, including pending court battles, prompt us to present this
page to the public. Fight spam to keep the Internet useful for
everyone.
o Filtering mail to your personal account
o Blocking spam email for an entire site
o Blocking Usenet spam for an entire site
o Blocking IP connectivity from spam sites
o Other tools and techniques for limiting spam
o Sample Acceptable Use Policy statements for ISPs
"Spam -- stop that!"
http://com.primenet.com/spamking/buyerbeware.html
"The Campaign to stop junk email web site"
http://www.mcs.com/~jcr/junkmail.html
...we will attempt to teach victims and potential victims (that's
everyone with an email address) the most effective methods of
prevention and retribution.
"news.admin.net-abuse.* Homepage"
Timothy M. Skirvin
http://www.ews.uiuc.edu/~tskirvin/home/nana/
"The automated spamhandler beta information heap."
http://www.halcyon.com/natew/
"Preventing relaying in Sendmail"
...This package adds two independent features to sendmail,
access control and relay control. They will be described here
simultaneously, but you can elect to include support for only one
of them (either one) on your mail server. Access control lets you
deny access to the server based on the senders envelope address or
his IP address. Relay control lets you decide who gets to relay
email through your server.
ftp://ftp.xyzzy.no/sendmail/access.tar.Z
"Anti-Spam Provisions in Sendmail 8.8"
http://www.sendmail.org/antispam.html
http://maps.vix.com/tsi/
http://www.informatik.uni-kiel.de/%7Eca/email/check.html#check_rcpt
o Preventing relaying through your SMTP port
o Refuse mail from selected hosts
o Restrict mail acceptance from certain users to avoid mailbombing
[1998-06-15 PM-L walter] Somebody's starting to exploit a hole in
sendmail 8.8, where giving a HELO longer than 1024 bytes causes
buffer overflow, and all following "Received:" headers are lost. If
it's done off a relay, we have no clue who sent it. There may be a
more elegant solution, but here's a quick-n-dirty procmail filter
for this stunt...
"Blocking Email"
http://www.nepean.uws.edu.au/users/david/pe/blockmail.html
o Do you or your users, receive "junk email" (aka., "spam")
o Do you have Sendmail R8.8.5 running at your site?
o Would you like to block known "junk email" senders' addresses?
Now you can - and there's no need to patch any source code, either.
Take advantage of Sendmail's check_mail rule, to see if the
sender's address is a member of a nominated "class" - drawn from
the contents of the named file. Additional information and links:
o Prospective Addresses/Domains to Block
o Limiting Unsolicited Commercial Email
o EFF "Net Abuse and Spamming" Archive
o [U.S.] Court Lets AOL Block Email
o Anti-Spam HOWTO
o Net Abuse FAQ
o Figuring out Fake Email & Posts
o Fight Unwanted Email
o Unsolicited Junk Email - Bad for Business
o Fight Unsolicited Email and Mailing
o Yahoo's Junk Email Resources
o jmfilter
o Complaints Addresses at U.S. ISPs
o news.admin.net-abuse.* Homepage
o Processing Mail With ProcMail
o Panix's rc.shared ProcMail Configuration
o ProcMail Workshop
o Email Self Defence
o The SPAM-L mailing list
"US Federal Trade Commission"
http://www.ftc.gov/
...staff publicized the Commission's UCE mailbox, "uce@ftc.gov,"
and invited consumers to forward their UCE to it. spam complaints
"Spam Spade Web based tracking tool"
http://www.blighty.com/
...Figuring out forged headers and verifying IP addresses and
whois information.
"Misc"
http://www.junkbusters.com/
http://www.well.com/~jbremson/spam
http://www.wolfenet.com/~jhardin/procmail-security.html
3.4 Comprehensive list of spammers
"Against Spam -- The garbage collecting."
http://www.spam-archive.org/
To support this archive please forward email spam to
. Everybody is invited to bounce Mail-Spam
he/she has got to this list. This is a mailing list to distribute
actual spam-eMail. All incoming mail will be checked by subject and
from/sender-address wether it has already been distributed or not.
No discussions in this list. To discuss about this list please
subscribe to .
To subscribe to _blacklist-update_ mailing list
TO:
BODY: subscribe blacklist-update you@somewhere.com
Mail to discuss about blacklist if
your name is on it. (maintained by Axel Zinser )
Get the updated blacklist from
ftp://ftp.spam-archive.org/spam/blacklist/
3.5 Misc pointers
Is there a way to block local users from spamming other sites?
Maybe somehow force sentmail to read a rc file that would maybe
then grab the from field and see if the user exists on the system
or not. Or run it through some sort of filters.
[philip] You can and should do this purely in sendmail. I ended up
crafting a check_from ruleset that verifies that the envelope
sender address is either a) not local; b) a local user; or c) a
local alias. At the time I did this mainly to force people to
configure their Eudora clients so they didn't say "Return Address:
yourname@gac.edu" but it also covers the outgoing bogus source
address spam case. For those interested in this kinda thing I've
(just) put it up for FTP:
ftp://ftp.gac.edu/pub/guenther/
"IBM's Secure Mailer -- open source"
http://www.postfix.org/
[1998-12-15 PM-L Matthew McGehrin ] The
official project is known as 'IBM's Secure Mailer'. The
unofficial codename was Vmailer, but they had to rename that, to
Postfix to agree with the lawyers. I should know, I have been
alpha testing this mailer for the past year, and it so blazing
fast, its amazing. It's faster and simplier to use than sendmail,
and also faster and more secure than qmail. It works fine with
procmail. (look in my headers). set
"mailbox_command=/usr/bin/procmail" in /etc/postfix/main.cf
[1998-12-15 PM-L Liviu Daia ] it has
explicit hooks for both procmail and RBL. In fact it's incredibly
easy to setup, I got it compiled and configured (with an actually
usable configuration) in about 15 minutes after downloading it.
Adding masquerading and a virtual domain took another 2 minutes.
:-) You should really give it a try, it's faster than QMail and
_much_ faster than sendmail. So far, I'm quite impressed.
"Qmail"
http://pobox.com/~djb/qmail.html
http://www.qmail.org/
"Sendmail"
http://www.sendmail.org/
"Fetchmail -- old pop3 replacement"
ftp://ftp.ccil.org/pub/esr/
http://www.ccil.org/~esr/
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/fetchmail/
"Maildrop filter utility"
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Peaks/5799/maildrop.README.html
...Alternative to procmail
"Lua"
http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/lua/
[possible replacement for procmail language] ... *Lua* is a
programming language originally designed for extending
applications, but also frequently used as a general-purpose,
stand-alone language. Lua combines simple procedural syntax
(similar to Pascal) with powerful data description constructs based
on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically
typed, interpreted from bytecodes, and has automatic memory
management with garbage collection, making it ideal for
configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping.
3.6 Questionable UBE stop services
"IEMMC: Internet E-Mail Marketing Council Formed 1997-03"
The IEMMC was formed to provide an industry wide trade association
for the purpose of promoting responsible e-mail marketing, and to
establish an industry standard code of procedures and ethics which
will internally regulate and govern the commercial e-mail marketing
industry....Under this system, all e-mail of a commercial,
unsolicited nature must pass through a universal filtration system
which will block the sending of any and all commercial e-mail to the
address on the list. Bulk e-mailers will be required to join the
organization
Others have commented that:
...IEMMC is a joke. you are probably not doing yourself any favors
...Don't take that IEMMC seriously! Many people registered with
them and got as many or even more spam as before. After all,
Cyberpromo (the operator of IEMMC) knows that the registered
addresses will be valid for some time, so they can use and sell
this valuable list to other junk mailers.
"Spammer blacklist"
http://www.netchem.com
... Dear Sir/Madam, Your email address may be on
many spammers' lists. We are compiling a *remove* list. Forward the
original junk to
"No Junk E-Mail database"
http://pages.ripco.com:8080/~glr/nojunk.html
...We will help stop unwanted email to you..the list is submitted to
us, and those addresses that appear in the "do not mail" list are
removed and the "cleaned" list is returned
3.7 UBE related newsgroups or mailing lists
alt.kill.spammers
alt.hackers.malicous
alt.2600
[1997-08-13 alt.privacy.anon-server by anonymous poster] Proper
etiquette demands you contact their ISP. However, if the ISP are
not interested in helping you, you should consider a posting in
alt.kill.spammers (or even alt.hackers.malicous or alt.2600) - give
as many details as you can about the spammer.
A certain spam-provider targeted the alt.hackers.malicious
newsgroup. Not the most sensible thing to do. The ISPs IPs were
found, their MX host was hacked. All their DNS entries was
published on alt.2600 (so that everyone could add filters to ignore
all mail from this company). Oh yeah, their password file also made
it to the group! The ISP then posted a complaint to alt.2600, much
to the enjoyment of everyone who took part. That host basically
died a horrible death. I'm pretty sure that not many people are
going to lose any sleep over this! I might as well mention that the
ISP's complaint mentioned that their "freedom" was being
abused. hehehe. Most of these postings can be seen in dejanews
or altavista archives of usenet.
"SPAM-L mailing list and Doug Muth's Page"
http://www.claws-and-paws.com/spam-l/
... "The SPAM-L FAQ" - A FAQ for SPAM-L, an anti-spam mailing list.
This FAQ discusses how to join the list and what to post there, AND
it also delves into the technical aspects of spam. For instance,
the various kinds of forgeries seen in spams are discussed here,
along with information on how to recognise them. If you hate spam,
this is something worth checking out... "TheGoodsites List" - I
maintain this list, which is part of the Spam Boycott, to show
which Internet providers out there act responsibly when dealing
with spam. If you're looking for an ISP and want to know where they
stand on spam, this is the list for you.
Send an email message to
with the words "subscribe SPAM-L " in the
body of the message (no quotes). f you would like to contact the
owner, the convention is the same as with all listserv lists. Just
send e-mail to
3.8 Software: the net abuse page
Scott Hazen Mueller
http://spam.abuse.net/spam/tools/
3.9 Software: adcomplain -- Perl junk email rport
http://www.rdrop.com/users/billmc/adcomplain.html
Adcomplain runs under Unix, Windows-NT, and Windows-95. Adcomplain
is a tool for reporting inappropriate commercial e-mail and usenet
postings, as well as chain letters and "make money fast" postings.
It automatically analyzes the message, composes an abuse report,
and mails the report to the offender's internet service provider.
The report is displayed for your approval prior to mailing.
Adcomplain can be invoked from the command line or automatically
from many news and mail readers.
#todo: url missing
[a user happy user reports] ...About 95% of all cases can be
traced correctly --- unless they come from a known spamhouse;
where complaining to them would not do much good anyway. Mailing
lists with strange Received-Headers also can present problems in
tracing
3.10 Software: Ricochet -- Perl junk email rport
http://www.vipul.net/ricochet/
Vipul Ved Prakash
MailingLi´st: with subject
"subscribe"
A lot of unsolicited email goes unreported because tracing the
origins of a possibly forged mail and finding the right people to
report to is complicated and time-consuming. Ricochet, a smart net
agent, automates this process. It traces the names and add resses
of the systems where the spam originated from along with the
servers that provide domain name resolution services to these
systems (in most cases their ISPs). Then it collects/generates a
list of email addresses of tech/billing/admin/abuse contacts of
these system and mails them a complaint and a copy of the spam.
Detailed description of its workings can be found in the README
file that comes with the package.
3.11 Software: yell -- perl
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/bo/bobmacd/yell (57k)
Bob MacDowell
yell - auto-responds to "spam" e-mail. Scans for site names, e-mail
addresses and Web site names and sends appropriate messages to
users, postmasters and Webmasters.
3.12 Software: ifile - Perl
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jr6b/ifile/
Jason Daniel Rennie
...ifile is different from other mail filtering programs in
three major ways: 1) ifile does not require you to generate a set
of rules in order to successfully filter mail 2) ifile uses the
entire content of messages for filtering purposes 3) ifile learns
as you move incorrectly filtered messages to new mailboxes ifile is
not dependent upon any specific mail system and should be adaptable
to any mail system which allows an outside program to perform mail
filtering. Currently, ifile has been adapted to the MH and EXMH
mail systems.
3.13 Software: RBL lookup tool -- C
[1997-12-04 PM-L Edward S. Marshall ]
...rblcheck is a lightweight C program for doing checks against
Paul Vixie's Blackhole List. It works well in conjunction with
Procmail for filtering unwanted bulk email (under QMail, for
example, you can invoke it with the value of the environment
variable TCPREMOTEIP). rblcheck is extremely simple:
% rblcheck 1.2.3.4
where 1.2.3.4 is the IP address you want to check.
This is a quick note to announce the availability of a new tool for
using Paul Vixie's RBL blacklist (see http://maps.vix.com/rbl/ for
more information about the blacklist itself, if you don't already
know). Most tools which use the blacklist block email on a
site-wide basis. For many networks, this treads on both the ideals
of the administration, and on the perceived freedoms of the end
user.
Personally, I don't care either way. :-)
This tool was to fill the need I personally had to reject mail,
since one of the systems I receive mail through cannot, for various
political reasons, implement the available RBL filters on a
site-wide basis.
rblcheck is a simple tool meant to be used from procmail and
other personal filtering systems under UNIX in the absence of a
site-wide filter, as an alternative to imposing site-wide
restrictions, or as a means of imposing restrictions on systems
that cannot support the existing RBL filter patches.
Simply put: you hand it an IP address, and it determines if the IP
is in the RBL filter, providing the caller with a positive or
negative response. With the package, a sample procmail recipe is
provided, and examples of using it under QMail and Sendmail are
given.
.http://maps.vix.com/rbl/
.http://www.isc.org/bind.html The official home page
.http://www.xnet.com/~emarshal/rblcheck/
It has only been tested under Linux 2.x and Solaris 2.5.1. Success
stories, patches, questions, suggestions, and flames can be
directed to me at .
[PM-L Aaron Schrab ] Here is my rbl
setup, but, this depends both upon the format of the Received:
lines, and the way that mail passes through your mail system.
I currently grab the IP address from the first Received: header
inserted by my ISP (I'm a sysadmin at the ISP, so I have a good
knowledge of how mail gets passed around internally). Here's the
recipe that I use.
# if there's a Received: header from one of these servers, it's
# (probably) the right one
BACKUPSERVER = "([yz]\.mx\.execpc\.com)"
VIRTSERVER = "(vm[0-9]+\.mx\.execpc\.com)"
LOCALSERVER = "([abc]\.mx\.execpc\.com)"
# Match a header containing:
# Received: []) by
:0
* $ $SUPREME^0 ^Received:.*\[\/[0-9.]+\]\)$s+by$s+${BACKUPSERVER}
* $ $SUPREME^0 ^Received:.*\[\/[0-9.]+\]\)$s+by$s+${VIRTSERVER}
* $ $SUPREME^0 ^Received:.*\[\/[0-9.]+\]\)$s+by$s+${LOCALSERVER}
{
IP = $MATCH
# trim it down to just the IP address
:0
* IP ?? ^^\/[0-9.]+
{
IP = $MATCH
:0 W
* ! ? /home/aarons/bin/rblcheck -q $IP
{
SPAM = "$SPAM $IP is rbl'd$NL"
}
}
}
It seems to be a procmail issue with letting the IP info
from sendmail pass through to the rblcheck program. I have not
been able to find anyone using rblcheck successfully with
procmail as a delivery agent...
[1998-03-26 PM-L Edward S. Marshall ] This is a
standard problem; you should be able to change the invocation of
procmail the same way as the example (run env, which in turn runs
procmail). Make sure that there is a '-p' argument passed to
procmail; this preserves the environment you're constructing with
env (newer sendmail revisions sanitize the environment for you, so
that's not really an issue).
If you're still having troubles, make sure you're using the latest
incarnation of rblcheck, with the latest supplied procmail recipe;
earlier revisions had rather insidious bugs.
[1998-03-26 PM-L Xavier Beaudouin (kiwi) ] Also it
seems that sendmail 8.9.0Beta3 has builtin rules for
rbl.maps.vix.com. This is somewhat really efficient. I use it with
sendmail 8.8.8 and tcpwrapper every day and there is about 80%
spam rejected. Sounds very good. In your /etc/hosts.allow just add
the following lines :
sendmail: ALL: spawn /usr/local/bin/rblcheck -q %a && \
exec /usr/sbin/sendmail -bs || /bin/echo \\
"469 Connection refused. You are in my Black List !!!\r\b\r\n"
&& \
(safe_finger -l @%h 2>&1 | /bin/mail -s "%d-%h %u" root)
In your /etc/inetd.conf just add this line :
smtp stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/tcpd \
/usr/sbin/sendmail -bs
And check that your sendmail is _not_ working as a daemon. That's
all. Also if you have huge queue you can add a /usr/sbin/sendmail -q
in the root crontab... This should help to send some waiting
messages. I think we can use this to wait for official 8.9.0
sendmail since there is some cf/feature/rbl.m4 there.
[timothy] ...I think there's a much more efficient way to do
this: you can compile sendmail -DTCPWRAPPERS and let it run as a
daemon
3.14 Software: mapSoN
Note: You can do exactly the same as below with procmail with one
of the listed procmail modules: pm-jacookie.rc. See the code.
"mapSoN (NoSpam backwards) -- The no spam utility"
http://mapson.gmd.de/
ftp://ftp.gmd.de/gmd/mapson/
Most spam filtering tools I've seen so far are based on procmail, or
a similar tool, and use a list of keywords or addresses to drop
unwanted junk mail. While this might be nice to filter mail from
known spam domains like "cyberpromo.com", it won't catch faked
headers.
mapSoN must be installed as filter program for your incoming mail,
usually by adding an appropriate entry to your $HOME/.forward file.
This means that mapSoN will get all your incoming mail and it will
decide whether or not to actually deliver it to your mailbox.
. First of all, an user defined ruleset is checked against the
mail. If any keywords or patterns match, the mail will be dealt
with according to your wishes. This is useful to drop some
sender's mail completely, or to sort mail into different mail
folders.
o If no rule matches the mail, mapSoN will check whether the mail
is a reply to an e-mail you sent, or whether it is a reply to a
USENET posting of yours. If it is, the mail will always be
delivered.
o If no signs of a reply-mail can be found, mapSoN will check
whether the sender stated in the From: header has sent you mail
before. If he has, the mail will pass. If this is the first time
you receive an e-mail from this address, though, mapSoN will
delay the delivery of the mail and spool it in your home
directory. Then it will send a short notice to the address the
mail comes from, which may look like this:
From: Peter Simons
To: never_mailed@me.before
Subject: [mapSoN] Request for Confirmation
mapSoN-Confirm-Cookie:
The person who tried to contact you will then reply to this
"request for confirmation", citing the cookie stated in the mail.
When your mapSoN receives this confirmation mail, it will deliver
the spooled mail into your folder. Furthermore, the address will be
added to the database, so that mail from this person will pass
directly in future.
If no confirmation mail arrives within a certain time, mapSoN can
either delete the spooled mails, or send them to a special folder,
or whatever you prefer.
3.15 Software: spamgard
[similar to MapSon]
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/wj/wje/release/sg-howto
...sppamgard(tm) screens from your e-mail unsolicited bulk mail. It
does this in a way that you only have to change things if you have
a new person from whom you _do_ want to receive mail; you don't
have to change things every time a spamster thinks of a new trick
to pull, or a new spamster comes along. And spamgard(tm) is
designed so that those who aren't in your "Good Guys" list can get
mail to you anyway until you put them there. The instructions for
them to get mail to you are simple and newbie-tested, but will
still keep out bulk mail. If you're on a mailing list you _want_ to
be on, there are provisions for accepting all mail from a set of
mailing lists that you specify.
3.16 Software: Spam Be Gone
"Spam Be Gone"
http://www.internz.com/SpamBeGone/
...uses machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies
to examine incoming mail messages and determine their
priority... is more than just a Spam filter, it's a general purpose
mail message prioritiser. You train the system, telling it which
are good, and which are bad messages. As Spam Be Gone! learns it
becomes customised for each individual user.
PM-L W. Wesley Groleau comments:
.> They only distribute binaries, and I'm paranoid. Anyone able to
.> convince me it's not really a Trojan Horse to collect addresses of
.> spam-haters or something even worse?
I did some sleuthing. I am 95% convinced that SpamBeGone is not
a front or cover for any spammer(s). To protect the author's
privacy, I won't say why I'm convinced or how I got the info.
Sorry. If you're paranoid like me, you'll have to do your own
sleuthing before you use it.
I'm also convinced SpamBeGone's theory is sound. I won't judge
the implementation until I've used it for a while.
PM-L R Lindberg & E Winnie comments:
I have to agree with the recent comments about Spam Be Gone, I
found it tends to be inaccurate. I first set it up about a week
ago, followed the directions and trained it on several (15 to 20)
messages. One from each list we get, and the remainder from my
logs of SPAM messages.
The first day it missed about half the SPAM, and nailed about 1/3
of the real messages. So I tuned the key-words a bit, trained it
on about 100 more SPAMs and trained it on all the good messages
it nailed. Since then it has nailed every SPAM received, however
the second day it nailed about 20% of the good messages, which I
then trained it to like. Since then it has been nailing about
10% of the good messages, despite continual training. I also
added every list to the address book, and it still nails posts
from this list, and my wife's lace list.
I even went through my entire log of SPAM and trained it on every
one that didn't come out a 5 (bad). Being the kind of person I
am, I also checked after I trained it, and found four SPAMs, the
despite my training it that they were bad (5) came out as not so
bad (4). I don't dare kill 4's as far too much of my mail (like
this list) ends up as 4's.
For me, this program is not ready for prime time. If the comments
are correct that it only learns on Subject and From headers, it's
not even worth trying. Since lists use the TO and CC headers to
be identified, and there are several excellent other headers
(X-Advertisement comes to mind) that would be assests for killing
SPAM.
3.17 Software: ClearMail
http://www.clearmail.com/ 1998-08-27
Scott R Carter
ClearMail offers individuals some very strong control over spam
through a quite unique concept. The software includes Procmail,
Perl and C code. System Requirements include:
ClearMail helps to control spam by allowing a user to classify
e-mail as high or low priority based on an Address Book or "White
List" of known senders. Unknown senders can also send high priority
mail by including a special Mail Key (token) in their message
(initial message from unknown sender without valid Key results in a
bounceback message with instructions).
What makes ClearMail different from similar concepts is that
spammers are not able to easily obtain the Mail Key to bypass the `
system because it is conveyed as an image.
o Unix operating system
o Shell accounts for users
o Individual .forward, .procmailrc files
o Sendmail
o Procmail
o Perl
o Public Web server
3.18 Software: TinyGnus - Emacs Gnus plug-in
http://poboxes.com/jari.aalto/ema-tiny.html
Platform: win32 and Unix Emacs versions.
*TinyGnus* Is Emacs lisp extension package that integrated directly
to Gnus mail/newsreaders. It includes simple but efective UBE
fighting hotkeys that make it possible to complain bunch of UBE
messages a once. Features:
o USER MUST DECIDE WHICH IS *ube* MAIL.
o User selects messages that are ube with Gnus select commands.
o Hotkey C-c ' u examines messages' headers and runs `nslookup'
for each Received header to determine *abuse* *spam* and
*postmaster* addresses where to send the complaint.
4.0 Procmail pointers
4.1 Where to get procmail binary
ftp://ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/pub/packages/procmail/
On-Line manual: http://www.voicenet.com/~dfma/intro.html
4.2 Where is procmail developed
Philip Guenther is currently taking care of and
coordinating procmail bug fixes. Please send any procmail bugs to
the mailing list or to . The development mailing
list is running SmarList at . Further
patch and bug info can be found at:
http://www.gac.edu/~guenther/procmail/todo.html
http://www.gac.edu/~guenther/procmail/warts.html
Newest Procmail code:
http://www.procmail.org/
ftp://ftp.procmail.org/
4.3 About procmail's Y2K compliance
Please consult Philip Guenther for more up to date
details. Philip is the Procmail maintainer currently.
[1998-09-23 Bennett Todd in Message-Id:
<19980923164230.C30594@fcmc.com>] Well, from a simple ogle of the
grep over the sources, it looks like there may be a Y2038 problem
in the autoconf test code: unsigned otimet = time(). And another,
possibly less likely to express itself, in formail.c: unsigned long
h1 = time(). Those could express themselves when 32-bit signed
time_t wraps; long before then the time_t define should have been
changed to something that is bigger, even if it's "long long". The
above type-mixes may fail to profit from a suitably redefined
time_t, and so may overflow on 2038.
I don't see any Y2K problems, though. And email headers use
four-digit years pretty consistently, so that should all be cool.
This estimation doesn't constitute an in-depth Y2k audit of
procmail, but the source code to procmail is ... kinda dense for
in-depth auditing.
[1998-09-25 Bennett Todd Message-Id:
<19980925093902.B12428@fcmc.com>] As I see it there are at least
three measures that a whole email system, taken in aggregate, could
use for Y2K checking. First, capture a vast cross-section of
traffic and make sure no email software is using 2-digit years. I
don't recall having seen any, but it's still worth checking.
Second, generate a load of traffic with 2000 and 2001 dates and
shove it through all the channels. And third, run all the systems
end-to-end with their system clocks rolling over the millenium.
4.4 Procmail mailing lists
Traffic in this list is about 5-20 messages per day. Do not join
if you can't handle that much traffic. The list is run by SmartList,
which is a procmail-based list management and distribution package.
._MailingList_: questions/answers
.subscription requests
.digest request
To get off the procmail mailing list
To get off the list: send a message to *procmail-request* with:
unsubscribe user@domain in the subject line
unsubscribe first line in the body
If that fails, try email to
(purportedly that should
go to a person). See also the original subscriptions message that
you will received http://www.iki.fi/~era/procmail/welcome.txt
4.5 Procmail recipe modules and faqs
Procmail is discussed in usenet newsgroup *comp.mail.misc*.
"Procmail archive"
ftp://ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de:/pub/packages/procmail/
Articles from procmail mailing list: covers from 1994-08 to 1995-05
(A .gz file: ~2Meg when uncompressed)
And latest articles can be found here, hosted by Achim Bohnet
Covers from 1995-10 to the present day.
. The www page has nice search capabilities.
http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/procmail/
http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/~ach/exmh/archive/procmail/
"Era's Procmail faq"
http://www.iki.fi/~era/procmail/mini-faq.html
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/~procmail/faq/ [mirror]
Also available by email, the ITEM can be: links.html, mini-faq.html,
procmail-faq
To:
Subject: send ITEM
"Era's Procmail Link collections"
http://www.iki.fi/~era/procmail/links.html
...A page full of good links to the world of procmail
"Catherine's Getting Started With Procmail"
http://shell3.ba.best.com/~ariel/nospam/proctut.shtml
This is a quick tutorial intended to get a procmail neophyte
started using procmail with as little trouble and fuss as possible.
"Joe Gross's short Procmail tutorial"
http://www.procmail.net/
...Using procmail and a
feature of ph you can set up your own mailing list without
needing root on your own machine.
"Unix manpages"
http://www.xs4all.nl/~pater/manpages/
...If you don't have procmail manpages at hand, check this site.
It contains a wealth of Unix related manpages online.
Jeroen Paternostre
4.6 Procmail mode for Emacs
If you use Emacs, please download the Procmail
programming mode, `tinypm.el'. Lint is included in there and it can
auto-correct mistakes on the fly. You can get it from the mentioned
_uta_ ftp site. Here is an example of its output:
*** 1997-11-24 22:13 (pm.lint) 3.11pre7 tinypm.el 1.80
cd /users/jaalto/junk/
pm.lint:010: Warning, no right hand variable found. ([$`']
pm.lint:055: Pedantic, flag orer style is not standard `hW:'
pm.lint:060: Warning, message dropped to folder, you need lock.
pm.lint:062: Warning, recipe with "|" may need `w' flag.
pm.lint:073: Warning, Formail used but no `f' flag found.
4.7 Procmail module list
Where to get the modules
The UBE stop procmail modules are not listed here. See pointers in
"procmail code" section later.
o All pm-ja*.rc modules are in Jari's procmail kit.
The Procmail code library page is at
http://www.procmail.org/jari/pm-code.html
o Other modules are by Alan Stebbens http://reality.sgi.com/aks/
o 1998-12-08 Eli the Bearded <*@qz.to> announced in
comp.mail.misc that he had made his procmail modules available
at http://www.qz.to/eli/src/procmail/. You may find
interesting procmail code there but the modules themselves are not
general purpose *plug-in* modules that you could use right
away. Some functionality included:
Inline decoding of MIME text attachments (rc.mime-decode)
Cleansing of obscure "Re:" formats in subject (rc.pre-list)
Nifty autoresponder (rc.qz-2)
Sophisticated dupicate email catching (rc.dupes)
Example of using my mail bouncer (rc.lists-out)
Detection of some classes of autoreplies (rc.daemon)
Various junk mail filtering (rc.filter)
Daily log files (rc.vars)
Terminology
*subroutine* = A piece of code that gets something in `INPUT' and
responds with `OUTPUT'. Subroutine is not message specific.
*recipe* = A piece of code that is somewhat self contained:
It reads something from the message or does something
according to matches in message. Recipe may be message-specific.
Foreword to using modules
