Beating spam…
May 7th, 2004 by HenI’m sure many people do this already, but I finally inverted my email system to save me from spam.
I’m already running spam-assassin, though it increasingly needs an update as it hits 50% of spam or so.
By inverted, I mean that rather than trying to get the spam out of my inbox, I throw everything out of my inbox and only allow things back in that are on my white-list. In fact, every single address has to be on the white-list, so much ends up in my HELD if people start Ccing etc.
I use pine by the way.
Anyway, this is working nicely. I have a snippet of procmail that reads from a whitelist file:
# Everyone who is not on the white-list:0:* ? formail -x”From” -x”From:” -x”Sender:” -x”Reply-To:” -x”Return-Path:” -x”To:” | egrep -is -v -f white-list$MAILDIR/HELD
and I have a nice quiet inbox. Mailing lists already get taken off to other places, and email to be moderated [commons-dev and commons-user] get put in a moderate folder.
I’m probably getting 50% of the email I want to read into the inbox, and as my trusted network slowly increases it will improve. If spam comes from a trusted source I do get it [as I’m not doing PGP or anything space-age], so it’s a drawback, but it would have been there anyway.