numbersix

Something I've often wondered, who would win in a fight between G-Force, Ulyses 31 and Warmington on Sea Home guard (dad's army)? This chap has done an excellent study on the subject, along with a number of other interesting combinations. Good work!

Thinking about a new plan of attack for the spam wars - education. Educate the masses to stop replying to the bloody stuff, and eventually it really would become unfeasable to run a spam business. Infact you could take this a few steps further, instead of making it illegal to send spam, why not make it illegal to reply to spam? Make a big song and dance about it in the media, scare the average Joe Schmo who is replying to the stuff in the first place, and you reach the same result - spam businesses will find it no longer makes any money.

Subject line of a spam message recently received :

"Make her scream for more with a few extra inches"

Doesn't that contradict itself?

Ever wanted to get your own back on those pesky 419 SPAM scams? The guys at 419eater.com make a hobby of it. I 'm going to have a go at this.

Cheers to Ben for the link.

A quick summary of how I fit all these together on a BSD system.

First install each from ports. Then configure fetchmail to fetch your mail from whereever it is, my .fetchmailrc file looks something like this:

# Fetchmailrc
#
poll mail.mailserver.com protocol pop3 no dns
user myusername
pass mypassword
mda "/usr/local/bin/maildrop -d %T"
no keep
fetchall

Notice the mda line which will invoke maildrop as the Mail Delivery Agent. Then write your maildrop filter. Mine is pretty simple, all it does is invoke Spam Assassin's client to scan the mail. I use pine to filter the messages into different folders so I don't have any more rules :

xfilter "/usr/local/bin/spamc"

And finally make sure Spam Assassin is running as a daemon, add this line to /etc/rc.conf:

spamd_enable="YES"

and then start the daemon:

/usr/local/etc/rc.d/sa-spamd.sh start

Then all you have to do is run fetchmail to get your mail, and your mail client to read it. Oh, and add filters to your mail client to actually filter the spam. I'll leave that exercise to the reader.