Re: tlug: SMTP and junk email [was: How are they doing this? ]

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

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tlug note from "Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>
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I hope this isn't redundant.  I didn't get any tlug mail between 8/12
14:00 and 8/14 8:56, so I may have missed something.

I wrote:

    me> ***** Filtering junk mail using procmail

    me> Anyway, the most important thing to do is to trash any mail
    me> with an "X-UIDL" header.  In my "archive" 298 of 500 junk
    me> messages had that header:

    me> bash-2.00$ scan +abuse | wc
    me>     500    4984   40400
    me> bash-2.00$ fgrep UIDL ~/Mail/abuse/* | wc
    me>     298     595   20680

    me> It is apparently added by some kind of bulk-mail software;
    me> I've never seen it in a real message.

Well, I have now.  My ding-a-ling department installed a new state of
the art DEC Alpha server, and completely hosed the MTA/MDA config.
For some reason my .forward from the server to my linux box is now
completely nonfunctional, so I'm using Eric Raymond's `fetchmail' over
POP3 to get the mail until they get it fixed.  Grr.

Anyway, UIDL seems to be used by POP3 and maybe IMAP to identify
messages so that you can request that the server send you only
"unseen" messages.  Now all my fetchmail-fetched mail has X-UIDL in
it; I'm going to have to make a better recipe to trash the junk
messages (yes, it's worth the complexity: the fraction of junk mail
making it through procmail has tripled in the 2 days since they
screwed the mail config and I had to stop filtering on X-UIDL).

So be careful about that one.  I hope I didn't confuse anybody too
much....

-- 
                            Stephen J. Turnbull
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences                    Yaseppochi-Gumi
University of Tsukuba                      http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tel: +81 (298) 53-5091;  Fax: 55-3849              turnbull@example.com
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