From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Oct 16 10:04:24 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id KAA10716 for questions-outgoing; Thu, 16 Oct 1997 10:04:24 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-questions) Received: from gdi.uoregon.edu (gdi.uoregon.edu [128.223.170.30]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id KAA10708 for ; Thu, 16 Oct 1997 10:04:17 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dwhite@gdi.uoregon.edu) Received: from localhost (dwhite@localhost) by gdi.uoregon.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id KAA02159; Thu, 16 Oct 1997 10:04:09 -0700 (PDT) Date: Thu, 16 Oct 1997 10:04:09 -0700 (PDT) From: Doug White Reply-To: Doug White To: Burton Sampley cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Anti-SPAM In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Tue, 14 Oct 1997, Burton Sampley wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > > Greetings, > > I've been using FBSD for over 1 year as my primary OS (I only keep > Mickey$oft around for games). My ISP (best.com) also uses FBSD for their > servers. Recently I have been receiving an increasing amount of > SPAM-mail. What can I do as a user and what can I advise Best (hopefully > they'll listen) to prevent SPAM from being delivered to my account? 1. Keep tight control over your email address. Give it only to people who really need it. Don't put it on warranty cards & such, they just sell your address when they sell your postal address. 2. Run procmail. procmail is a small program that scans your incoming mail for certain strings and re-files the message based on rules. Well, all you do is search for spamming sites and dump them to /dev/null :) I have my current filter list on my homepage. procmail is instlled on many larger sites and ISPs; if it isn't, ask your sysadmin to insall it for everyone's benefit. If they won't, that's what ~/bin/ is for. :) 3. Don't post to usenet if you can help it. Spammers are just waiting in the wings for new posters so they can swipe your email and spam you. Avoid putting your email address in a scannable form or mailto: on your web pages too. Spiders pick them up and put you on their mailing list. 4. Never patronize spammers. Don't even grant them a reply; they run anti-bad-response filters and they take it as acknowledgement that you exist, so they send you more. Don't buy things from spammers. Make them pay for their spam by losing a customer. Hope this helps. I've had to deal with this, got mad at first, and that didn't help. I killed one spammer in about 5 attempts. Then i put procmail on and kept adding rules. Doug White | University of Oregon Internet: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu | Residence Networking Assistant http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dwhite | Computer Science Major