Info Catalog gnus: The problem of spam gnus: Thwarting Email Spam gnus: SpamAssassin

gnus: Anti-Spam Basics

 
 9.16.2 Anti-Spam Basics
 -----------------------
 
 One way of dealing with spam is having Gnus split out all spam into a
 ‘spam’ mail group (Splitting Mail).
 
    First, pick one (1) valid mail address that you can be reached at,
 and put it in your ‘From’ header of all your news articles.  (I’ve
 chosen ‘larsi@trym.ifi.uio.no’, but for many addresses on the form
 ‘larsi+usenet@ifi.uio.no’ will be a better choice.  Ask your sysadmin
 whether your sendmail installation accepts keywords in the local part of
 the mail address.)
 
      (setq message-default-news-headers
            "From: Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@trym.ifi.uio.no>\n")
 
 Fancy Mail Splitting::):
 
      (...
       (to "larsi@trym.ifi.uio.no"
           (| ("subject" "re:.*" "misc")
              ("references" ".*@.*" "misc")
              "spam"))
       ...)
 
    This says that all mail to this address is suspect, but if it has a
 ‘Subject’ that starts with a ‘Re:’ or has a ‘References’ header, it’s
 probably ok.  All the rest goes to the ‘spam’ group.  (This idea
 probably comes from Tim Pierce.)
 
    In addition, many mail spammers talk directly to your SMTP server and
 do not include your email address explicitly in the ‘To’ header.  Why
 they do this is unknown—perhaps it’s to thwart this thwarting scheme?
 In any case, this is trivial to deal with—you just put anything not
 addressed to you in the ‘spam’ group by ending your fancy split rule in
 this way:
 
      (
       ...
       (to "larsi" "misc")
       "spam")
 
    In my experience, this will sort virtually everything into the right
 group.  You still have to check the ‘spam’ group from time to time to
 check for legitimate mail, though.  If you feel like being a good net
 citizen, you can even send off complaints to the proper authorities on
 each unsolicited commercial email—at your leisure.
 
    This works for me.  It allows people an easy way to contact me (they
 can just press ‘r’ in the usual way), and I’m not bothered at all with
 spam.  It’s a win-win situation.  Forging ‘From’ headers to point to
 non-existent domains is yucky, in my opinion.
 
    Be careful with this approach.  Spammers are wise to it.
 

Info Catalog gnus: The problem of spam gnus: Thwarting Email Spam gnus: SpamAssassin