Gossamer Forum
Home : Products : Gossamer Mail : Discussion :

Spam Issues

Quote Reply
Spam Issues
Hi,

The spam fighting given to admin now is very limited and restricted to the 'From' field. This really is not enough as many spam can be stopped at source if admin was also able to filter To and Subject fields as well.

For example:

1) When there is no TO (Actually now GM calls it 'No To' and it is always spam)

2) When there is a large number of recipients in To header (Say more than 20)

3) When there are many entries in 'to' or 'cc' fields and many of these are invalid. For example, if my email address is franklo@domain.com then I get spam as follows:

frank@domain.com, frank1@domain.com, frank2@domain.com, frankl@domain.com, franklo@domain.com,...

Meaning whoever is sending the spam is trying various variations hoping that one is correct. So what I would like to see is that, in case of multiple recipients to same domain, if one of the recipients is invalid then no message will be delivered to any. Meaning in the example above, the fact that frank@domain.com, frank1@domain.com, frank2@domain.com, will prevent franklo@domain.com from receiving spam.

4) If 'to' or 'cc' have same username at multiple domains...e.g. franklo@domain1.com, franklo@domain2.com, franklo@domain3.com, franklo@domain4.com, franklo@domain5.com, franklo@domain6.com...

5) When 'to' shows something like: 'Undisclosed Recipients@..."

Then again this is invariably spam and so no message should be delivered to anyone.

Is the above doable?

Thanks

Frank

Last edited by:

frankLo: Mar 16, 2002, 1:44 PM
Quote Reply
Re: [frankLo] Spam Issues In reply to
Hi,

It would be doable, but if it were to be part of Gossamer Mail, we'd need to add a lot more control/configuration. A lot of those rules would filter out legitmate email for me.

We'll look into how this can be improved though.

Cheers,

Alex
--
Gossamer Threads Inc.
Quote Reply
Re: [Alex] Spam Issues In reply to
Hey Alex,

Thanks for your reply. Maybe these rules can be made into optional features for admin so that those that believe it will help them, they can activate it otherwise they don't.

Around 95% of spam that comes to my server falls under one of above mentionned rules

Cheers,

Frank
Quote Reply
Re: [Alex] Spam Issues In reply to
Hey Alex,

I was actually thinking of this which I believe would be a great feature to have and would in the end impact spam.

Let's say me as a user login to my email account and find spam that has managed to make it through various filters in place. If I have the ability to have that email message bounce back then it would be great as this would be interpreted to spammer as invalid email address and that email address will be eventually dropped from spammer's database. So if I can put checkmark in boxes next to the spam messages and click on an 'bounce' image, and have that functionality, I think that would be great. That's far better than actually having the message delivered which will convey message to spammer that email address is valid and functional.

What are your thoughts on this?

Cheers,

Frank
Quote Reply
Re: [frankLo] Spam Issues In reply to
That usually won't work, as 99% of the time, the email's From fields are forged with spam (ie. they put invalid email addresses like qtryetruwy@hotmail.com in the from field). There are some people who 'spam' and put their actual email as their From field (eg. people with businesses who mass email people), but I've yet to ever receive such spam.

Adrian
Quote Reply
Re: [frankLo] Spam Issues In reply to
frankLo, you might want to have a look at procmail, I'd say there home page is at http://www.procmail.org/ but I just had a look and something's way messed up, it showing a site for Gustavus Adolphus College, wonder if they lost the name or got hacked, or maybe just some nameserver screwed up... but here's an alternate page where you can find some info http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/...s/reriksso/procmail/

It takes a little while to learn how to write the recipes for catching spam and deciding what to do with it, but you could put a procmail file in the home dir for the email user and catch and dump that stuff before it even hits the webmail system.

Some side benefits (the list is a god help) are being able to block out a lot of the viruses and worms that keep popping up.
Quote Reply
Re: [JerryP] Spam Issues In reply to
WinkProcmail is the way to go! We use it and it's awesome. User hostile to learn, but oh so powerful.

There are some great recipes out there, and it will take the overhead of filtering it off your Gmail installation.

Diversity by Design