On Tue, Jun 15, 2004 at 11:42:57AM -0400, Charlie Summers wrote:
At 10:43 AM -0400 6/15/04, Terry Todd is rumored to have typed:
What I'm wonndering is if anyone has done anything to beef up the dist file or accept file format so it checks for more than just the email address of the subscriber.
You just answered your own question. The stock SmartList contains only email addresses within the dist file (although it allows for some additional information, that information is not captured by the stock SmartList), so you can NOT check for "more." Feel free to code the additiona, but you'll quickly realize you have yet another problem...
a dist file entry something like this
"Senders Name" <email@mydomain.com> 192.168.1.1 (comment)
Which would be impossible to mail _to,_ which is the central purpose of the dist list (have a ball rewriting choplist to deal with stripping out the email address from that line). Also makes no sense at all, since most people on the Net use dynamically-allocated IPs instead of fixed IPs, so your idea of tagging everyone to an IP (even a C or B block) is futile. You'd be rejecting valid submissions routinely, ticking off your subscribers.
I had been thinking of using SmartList as a spam filter
OK forget I ever suggested using smartlist as a spam filter. I've tried many many other spam filtering solutions. None of them work 100%. So I wrote my own that is essentially the same thing as what I suggested here. It is a whitelist of only those I accept email from. It works. The original problem is spam got through to a smartlist mailing list by header information being faked. How can that be prevented? What do others using smartlist do to prevent this from happening? Terry Todd
SmartList is not designed to be a spam filter. It is a mailing list distribution package. If you want a spam filter...use a spam filter. To protect SmartList, pipe the mail from rc.local.s00 to whatever spam filter you choose.
If you run your own mail server, there are hundreds of solutions (RBLs, content filters [yuck], massive blocking of dynamic IPs in the access database, etc., etc). If you are on a shared server and don't control your own mail server, use one (or more) of the many procmail/perl solutions out there. Why would you attempt to rewrite mailing list distribution software to a spam filter, when you could do what you suggest above with a single recipe* in your personal .procmailrc file anyway? It's like using your email client as a word processor to write a novel; you might get it to work, but it'll cause you no end of unnecessary grief when OpenOffice is available to make it more efficient. Right tool for the right job.
Charlie
* A recipe like...
:0 # Yeah, no escapes, I know, I'm in a hurry * ^From.*tlt@badger.tltodd.com * !^Received*192.168.1.1 /path/to/home/possible_spam.txt
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