Evolution

[Jeffrey F. Bloss]

John Dangler wrote:

> Since applying for a scholarship online about 2 weeks ago, I have been
> consistently inundated with spam mail in my personal email box
> (approximately 500-600 per day).  I've been setting up rules to filter
> this, but I do notice 2 things
> (1) the douche bags who insist on doing this just keep changing the
> names of the subject, and the source (xlt.com , xlti.com, xtli.com,
> txltet.com) ... 

That's nothing. Wait 'till you have to start dealing with Markov Chain
generated "random text" formed from bits and pieces of valid messages,
or things like common README or man pages.

Sounds like the spammers are taking it easy on you. For now. ;-)

> (2) some of the filters don't even work, which for the life of me i
> cannot figure out why... i.e. (I have a rule looking for _any_ of
> single, singles, Single, Singles, SINGLE, SINGLES; I get an email with
> Are you tired of being single ? in the subject, and the filter leaves it
> alone) ...

We'd have to see your filter rules to say for sure, but things
to look for in general and not specific even to Evolution, are an
earlier rule triggers and the later rule is never applied, simple
spelling errors, or little "gotchas" like not realizing certain header
specific tests are done using regex rather than plain vanilla pattern
matching.

But that's all academic because you really shouldn't be using filtering
rules to deal with spam anyway. It's infuriatingly frustrating, as you
seem to be all too aware of already.

I don't use Evolution much, but I do see it has "plugins" for both
Bogofilter and Spamassassin. I'd start by installing Bogo, enabling the
Evolution plugin (and disabling the Spamassassin plugin), then setting
up one of my my first rules to be a "Junk Test". Train Bogo by using
the Message > Mark as (not)Junk  menu selections on a bunch of relevant
messages. It sounds like you have plenty of examples to "Mark as Junk"
anyway. ;)

If after a while you don't feel Bogo is doing the job, try Spamassassin.
It's a bit more feature rich but noticeably slower when installed
locally. And remember that either of these two fine spam filters need
trained with real life examples of the spam you're getting, as well as
examples of your own non-spam (ham) messages, before they're really
effective.

> 
> At this point, I'd like to blacklist my entire mailbox, and open it only
> to those I want to allow in, either by sending an autoresponse (like
> "hey, reply to this and i'll read your mail") , or some other method.

ARRRRGH! ;)

This is called challenge/response, and it's pure evil. It increases
the load of unwanted traffic at least by a factor of two in  most cases,
causes problems for both the forged address the spam was allegedly sent
from *and* yourself as a result of the actions taken by people who have
their addresses forged (you may find yourself on a spammer list
yourself), and it's a great way to make sure you'll get *more* spam
because spam bot software is often "dumb"... it doesn't check to see
if some reply from a probed random address is a C/R or not, it just
gets senses a heart beat and marks that address as "spam-able".

I'd whitelist my "friends" so their messages weren't even subject to
the spam filter tests maybe (I think Evolution can do this for addresses
in your address book), but that's as far as I'd go.

> 
> Is there a way to set this up in Evolution?
> 
> Thanks for the input.  Other than this list, and 2 or 3 other tech
> lists, I don't get much mail (until recently).

Are you sure the flood gates were opened by applying for the
scholarship? Have you reported the site or agency you applied through
to various Internet entities that deal with this sort of crap? They may
be violating a TOS, or even the the law, by selling your address to
scumbags.

-- 
     _?_      Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.
    (o o)         Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
-oOO-(_)--OOo------------------------------[ Groucho Marx ]---
                    http://wrench.homelinux.net/~jeff/
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