Evolution

[Dave Scott]

Jeffrey F. Bloss wrote:

>John Dangler wrote:
>
>  
>
>>>>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.
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>Well, you don't want to do that.
>>>
>>>You've just suggested spamming the From: address of every forged e-mail
>>>you receive. You'd become part of the problem then.
>>>      
>>>
>>How does that work?
>>    
>>
>
>How does it *not* work? 
>
>If you challenge every unknown address and I start force feeding you
>messages with a forged From/Reply-To/etc headers, you're going to
>automatically send your challenge to those addresses, not me. If they're
>forgeries of live addresses there's probably someone on the other end
>saying "WTH is this crap!".
>
>Even if they're not live addresses you're still forcing extra useless
>messages through an already busy pipe. If your challenge/response
>scheme is *really* brain dead it may even escalate the problem by
>trying to re-challenge the bounce messages its challenges generate.
>Even if it's smart enough to recognize "endless loop" problems (not
>always as easy as it sounds), you're still sending out unsolicited
>messages in bulk, which by strict definition makes you one of the
>BadGuys(tm).
>
>You *might* even be used as a pawn to flood/annoy/DoS a third party by
>someone purposefully forging a specific address and having you send
>multiple challenges. Arguably putting you in the unenviable position of
>being classified as an "open relay" by your ISP, and having your
>account yanked. :(
>
>  
>
>>>>Is there a way to set this up in Evolution?
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>As a starter, set up a filter that redirects all mail to the Trash
>>>unless it matches each address in your list.
>>>      
>>>
>>So this would be like setting up rules to say if sender is
>>such-and-such, move to inbox..., (but how do you set up mail to go
>>somewhere else by default?) but as a default everything would go to a
>>hold/trash folder.  Then if I don't move it, its trashed, either
>>programmatically or via some other method (although I hope the other
>>method isn't manual, since right now it takes me about an hour a day
>>just to dump mail I know I don't want)...
>>    
>>
>
>Evolution (I think) has a conditional to check if an email address is in
>your address book. If that's met, move the messages to a folder named
>"Friends" or whatever. You might want some rules just before this to
>move mailing list messages to their own folder just to cut down on
>processing time, but however you sort "known good" messages from unknown
>messages your very last rule will be a "match everything" condition that
>"moves to trash". Rules are generally executed in order, with any
>"move" action ending the processing of that particular message.
>
>The "delete what's left" method is a heavy handed way of dealing with
>spam that will almost undoubtedly result in lost mail. Better to move
>to an "Uncertain" folder and hand sort your leftovers, but then that's
>not much better than no filtering. You still have to see the crap.
>
>The best overall course of action IMO, is to first whitelist your
>"friends" then submit what's left to a good Bayesian spam filter. The
>stuff that triggers Bayes filtering gets marked read and moved aside so
>you don't have to see it, but it's still there in case you find
>something important has gone missing. What's left after the "friends"
>and Bayes filtering is all you really have to hand sort, and with a
>little training that's going to be a pretty minor inconvenience. 
>
>I process upwards of 1000 messages a day on my little home server, most
>of them mailing list messages. Between 10 and maybe 50 of them will be 
>spam. With the method above and using only Bogofilter and ClamAV (which
>detects some phishing attempts), I only actually have to look at maybe
>1 or 2 spam messages a week, on a bad week. :)
>  
>
I'm using Thunderbird and have tried setting up filters both ways. The 
easiest I've found is to start with a "move everything to trash" where 
the match condition is two-fold - one to check to see if "@" is in the 
From: field and one to check to see if "@" is *not* in the From: field. 
That guarantees every message will be processed and nothing should end 
up in the inbox.

Then I start inserting whitelist filters above that "catch-all" and 
direct them to move the message to a specific folder. The reason I chose 
this method is that I put a number of messages together in the same 
folder from different senders. Family gets all the email from family and 
close friends. Techstuff gets all the web technical stuff I subscribe to.

I like the idea of putting list filters first, but they don't all come 
to the same account, so I just set up filters there as needed.

Dave

-- 
David E. Scott              
DaveScott at Columbus dot rr dot com   Software Development


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