Subject: Re: someone is bothering me HELP!!!!

From: "'Rob' R. Fulwell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 1 Nov 1996 16:22:31 -0800

<using procmail to filter harassing e-mails - SNIP>

Or you could use filter.  It is fairly easy to set up.  You put a line in
you .forward file like:

| /usr/local/bin/filter

and create a filter-rules file which includes a rule like:

if (from = "ex-boyfriends-address") then delete

and you will never see mails from this person again.  The filter can also
create a log to let you know about everying it does.  This information
(and much more is available by typing 'man filter' (no quotes) at your
shell prompt.  There is also probably a longer filter document on the
system there which will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about
filtering your mail.

If you wanted a slightly fancier solution you could have the filter reply
to mails from this person with an automated response saying that the mail
had been summarily deleted and would never be seen.

Good luck.

--
Rob Fulwell <[email-masked]>
http://weber.u.washington.edu/~miser or keyserver for PGP public key
NOTICE: Please check the above web page for my policy on commercial e-mail

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From: Mike Harris <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 1 Nov 1996 21:45:28 -0500

This girl's predicament, and many others, is *exactly* why I think
PINE needs the ability for killfiles.

Mike

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From: Jago <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 20:19:05 -0500

On Thu, 31 Oct 1996, Dowell Sean wrote:

> This may be a dumb question but i hope someone answers it!!
> 
> My girlfriend has e-mail with university the same as i do and she writes
> to some of her friends at home.  An exboyfriend of hers has her address
> and often writes letters to her, we changed her address but she always has
> to write her friends and because of mutual friends her boyfriend always
> will get her address. Is there any way to block out his E-mail or his name
> from any address or something. this is really annoying and I have bounced
> his mail back but he is persistant. please if anybody knows anything that
> could help or anywhere i could ask please leave me a message here 

She'll have to use a mail filtering program like procmail (or DELIVER if
she's on VMS).  I'm not familiar with procmail at all, so I can't offer
any pointers on how to set it up (I'm learning it slowly as we speak).
However, her ex-boyfriend could really get into trouble, for his actions
could possibly be labeled as harassment.  I say 'possibly' because it
depends on how she's treating the situation.  If she really wants him to
stop, she could request it by writing a letter to the 'postmaster' account
at his site.  Most postmasters are quite prompt at handling account
abuse.  Of course, I would treat this as a last resort, but do not
hesitate to do it when it's necessary!  Hope this helps!

--
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{ Addr: [email-masked]  Major field: MM Performance           }
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From: Paul O Bartlett <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Nov 1996 18:34:48 -0500

On 3 Nov 1996, High Flight wrote:

> I'd hate to post a "me too," so I'll add something.  That seems to be the
> only major user-friendly feature that's missing.  Is it just not feasible
> from an engineering perspective?

    Once upon a time I seem to remember one of the Pine Development
Team commenting in passing that killfiles were at least under
consideration for a future version of Pine.

Paul                             <[email-masked]>
----------------------------------------------------------
Paul O. Bartlett, P.O. Box 857, Vienna, VA 22183-0857, USA
Finger, keyserver, or WWW for PGP 2.6.2 public key 
Home Page:  URL: http://www.access.digex.net/~pobart

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From: Dowell Sean <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 1 Nov 1996 12:20:10 -0500

On Thu, 31 Oct 1996, Derrick Green wrote:

> Yes, get procmail filtering (if you're on UNIX) and write the following
> recipe.
> 
> :0
> * ^From:.([email-masked][email-masked])
> /dev/null
> 
> That will throw it into the trash.  You can put as many email addresses
> these as you like.  You can also write scripts that will bounce it right
> back to him with a message.
> 
> The bottom line is that you have to have procmail filtering or some other
> mail filtering program.
> 
> ---
> Derrick Green
> [email-masked]
> 
can you use wildcards with his name or country etc ??
The Honourable

SEAN H.N. DOWELL

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From: "'Rob' R. Fulwell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Nov 1996 15:56:43 -0800

On 3 Nov 1996, High Flight wrote:

> Mike Harris ([email-masked]) wrote:
> : This girl's predicament, and many others, is *exactly* why I think
> : PINE needs the ability for killfiles.
> 

Well, Pine does not do any filtering (that is left to outside programs
that are specifically made for this purpose (see the threads about
procmail and filter)).

Having the facility for killfiles (with e-mail) would mean that Pine would
have to do some pre-processing of the mail as it arrived.  This is
typically done by filter programs, so would not be handled by Pine.

It seems that it would be more likely for Pine to incorporate killfiles
when reading news as Pine handles all the fetching and display of
newsgroups and there is not another external program that would handle the
filtering of these articles.

I suppose it would be possible for someone to write an interface between
Pine and your filter program of choice, thus making it easier for the user
to control the filtering process.

--
Rob Fulwell <[email-masked]> Dod#0718-GS850L
http://weber.u.washington.edu/~miser or keyserver for PGP public key
NOTICE: Please check the above web page for my policy on commercial e-mail

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From: Jeffrey Goldberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Nov 1996 18:28:08 +0000

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

> This may be a dumb question but i hope someone answers it!!

Good question, wrong list.
 
> will get her address.

> Is there any way to block out his E-mail or his name
> his mail back but he is persistant.

There are tools (procmail) which can be used to filter incoming mail.
Setting it up depends on your system and you may need to contact local
support.

But, for this kind of case I recommend the following:

Your friend should

 (1) write a clear and unambiguous message to the
     person that she insists that he no longer send her mail. 

     It should be polite, but there must be no two ways of interperting
     it.

 (2) When that fails (it will, but it is a crucial step), she should tell
     him clearly and unambiguously that if he persists in this she will
     talk to the university's Email people (Postmaster).

 (3) If he continues you MUST follow up and talk to your email people.
     They may be willing to do things unofficially or they may insist
     on persuing matters in a way that may raise a stink.  My experience
     is that they will try a low-key quiet approach before taking further
     action.

I have seen cases where 1 and 2 worked.  And where on step 3 the
postmaster in agreement with the person getting the mail informally
approached the sender to make it quite clear that the recipient
really didn't want to get the messages.  I have never personally
seen a case go beyond that.

- -j
- --
Jeffrey Goldberg                +44 (0)1234 750 111 x 2826
 Cranfield Computer Centre      FAX         751 814
 [email-masked]     http://WWW.Cranfield.ac.uk/public/cc/cc047/
"I am much fonder of my critics than I am of my fans."  --Thomas Kuhn (d 1996)

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From: [email-masked] (Jim Davis)
Date: 4 Nov 1996 11:57:42 -0700

In article <[email-masked]>, High Flight <[email-masked]> wrote:
:Mike Harris ([email-masked]) wrote:
:: This girl's predicament, and many others, is *exactly* why I think
:: PINE needs the ability for killfiles.
:
:I'd hate to post a "me too," so I'll add something.  That seems to be the
:only major user-friendly feature that's missing.  Is it just not feasible
:from an engineering perspective?

The natural place for filtering is between the mail transport agent
(e.g. sendmail, on most UNIX systems) and the mail user agent (pine).
I suppose you could have pine look into the mailbox and simply not
display, or actually delete, certain messages according to a killfile,
but that wouldn't be of much help if someone was mailbombing you.
Then you need something to keep the messages out of your mailbox
altogether.

A robust and full-featured mail filter is a nontrivial program; look
at the procmail distribution for example.  It would add a lot to the
size and complexity of pine to bundle something on that scale into
what is already a pretty big program.

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From: Derrick Green <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 16:45:23 -0600

:0

---
Derrick Green
[email-masked]

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From: [email-masked] (Tim Cutts)
Date: 7 Nov 1996 10:46:37 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,

>Then you need something to keep the messages out of your mailbox

My site uses a Mail Transport Agent called exim, which includes fairly
sophisticated mail filtering.  This is not useful for the original
poster in this thread, but it is very good at cutting down on general
spam.

Exim is configurable to refuse SMTP connections from certain sites
completely, or it can reject mail from certain users/sites at the RCPT
level (ie it claims the recipient user doesn't exist, even if they
do).  Lastly it can silently trash mail from given sites.

Tim.

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From: [email-masked] (David Bromage)
Date: 8 Nov 1996 09:36:22 GMT

>PINE needs the ability for killfiles.

if you're running pine you can run procmail.

Cheers
David