X-Spam-Flag: YES
is added to the headers as well as a verbose explanation of the
scoring.
Depending on the mail reader you use, all this may be totally hidden
from you.
Netscape,
for example, will only show you
the
From:,
To:,
Date:
and
Subject:
header lines.
emacs rmail,
on the other hand, will show you all headers except the
Received:
lines.
It is possible to redirect mail tagged as possible spam so the volume of it won't interfere with your normal work. If you read your mail from a unix machine, you can use procmail to do that redirection.
To start using procmail, put
"|IFS=' ';exec /usr/local/bin/procmail #YOUR_LOGIN_NAME"
in your
.forward
file,
where
"YOUR_LOGIN_NAME"
is your user ID.
(Note: All punctuation including single- and double-quotes,
semi-colon, and pound sign must appear as illustrated.)
Next, create the file
.procmailrc
in your home directory into which you will put small sets of
instructions (called "recipes") telling
procmail
how to deal with incoming messages.
:0:
* ^X-Spam-Flag: YES
$HOME/mail/spam
This recipe contains three lines.
The first line marks the beginning of the recipe and tells
procmail
to use a lock file while performing this action.
The second line is a regular expression
procmail
uses to test each of the headers of the message.
The third line indicates the file into which to put this message
should the above test match any line in the headers.
So this recipe says "If any line in the headers starts with
'X-Spam-Flag: YES',
put it in the file
spam
in the
mail
subdirectory of my home directory."
:0:
* ^From: .*list-admin@somecompany.com
$ORGMAIL
This recipe demonstrates how to create an exception to the normal spam
routing.
The second line in this recipe matches all messages from
"list-admin@somecompany.com".
(You could also match on the
"To:"
or any other header line.
Judge by what is common among the class of messages you would like
passed on.)
The third line says to put the message in your normal mail queue file.
Since
procmail
processes recipes in the order in which they appear in your
.procmailrc,
this recipe should be put
before
the above routing recipe.
While a large percentage of messages tagged as spam really will be spam (> 90%, we estimate), occasionally legitimate messages will be tagged. For instance, any message mentioning "mortgage rates" automatically has a high enough score by the current scoring method to be tagged as spam. For this reason, we recommend that you route tagged email to a separate file and periodically review those messages to confirm that they are, in fact, unwanted. (The period for this review should be no longer than you would want to keep a legitimate message waiting.)
:0:
* ^X-Spam-Flag: YES
/dev/null
Though we highly recommend against it, this recipe will discard all
messages tagged as spam.
This recipe is identical to the routing recipe above, except the
destination is
/dev/null,
the "bit bucket."
If you do this, you
will
lose legitimate messages.
Neither you nor the sender will be notified that the message has been
discarded.
It will just disappear.
cd # start in your home directory.
mkdir mail # create a mail directory if one doe
# not already exist. (If you have a
# file named mail, you should rename it.)
cp /fac/u/watrous/Sample/.procmailrc . # copy the sample
# .procmailrc to your home directory.
emacs .procmailrc # edit it to customize your own spam
# filtering exceptions, spam file
# destination, etc.
If you are not on the DCS faculty cluster, download the sample file
from the link instead of copying it.