Re: [cobalt-users] Getting Mail Bombed!

["Steve Werby" <steve-lists@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Carrie Bartkowiak" <ravencarrie@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Arrgh. Hope we can get this figured out, because if it's bombing him,
> it's gonna be spreading quickly and we'll all have to deal with it
> shortly.

That's not necessarily the right conclusion to make.  But I agree that it's
wise to be prepared.  Better to have a solution ready than to have to start
thinking about coming up with one hours after you need it.

> Is there something "under the hood" - like procmail - that we could
> use to filter and deny based on the subject line? (i know nothing
> about procmail but have this idea that it's the end-all be-all of
> what you want to do with email...)

Absolutely.  procmail is installed on the RaQs.  It wasn't clear to me
whether the subject was always the same, but assuming it is a procmail
recipe can be created to filter on the subject header and route mail to a
special folder or /dev/null (Linux black hole).  There are plenty of great
procmail resources which can easily be found from google.com (or this list
as I've posted some before, sure others have to) so I'll just give a quick
example to get you started.  Assume you want to filter email with subjects
that contain either "free" or "credit", example 1 will send to a special
folder, example 2 will black hole the message.

:0:
    *^Subject: .*(free|credit).*
    in-junk

:0:
    *^Subject: .*(free|credit).*
    /dev/null

procmail can filter on any email header (from, to, sender, etc.) and can
route messages, filter messages, execute programs (autoresponders, file
servers, etc.) and more.  There's a nice free procmail-based spam filter at
http://www.spambouncer.org/ that will make setting up procmail recipes a lot
easier.

--
Steve Werby
President, Befriend Internet Services LLC
http://www.befriend.com/