Subject: Dealing with lusers

From: Ian Hall-Beyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Dec 1998 17:51:59 -0700 (MST)

For those of you havong problems with certain members of the list,

This entry works just great for me...

# lusers
:0:
*^From:@kens.com
/dev/null                     

-Ian

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From: Timothy J Luoma <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Dec 1998 20:57:05 -0500

Author:	Ian Hall-Beyer <[email-masked]>
	Date:	Tue, 8 Dec 1998 17:51:59 -0700 (MST)
	ID:	<[email-masked]>

> /dev/null

You don't need to lockfile /dev/null

Also, your From: line will never match anything as-is, you need a .* before  
the @ and a space after the colon, preferably a tab or space option

Oh, and you should escape the . too so it doesn't match as a wildcard.

:0
* ^From:[ 	].*@kens\.com
/dev/null

There's a space then tab in that [ ]

Hey, if we're going to go offtopic into procmail recipes, let's at least get  
them syntactically correct.

TjL

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From: Ken Woods <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Dec 1998 21:08:38 -0500 (EST)

Yep, that'd be good.
Filter a whole domain.

[/etc] uname -n
kens.com
[/etc] wc -l /etc/passwd
  2532 /etc/passwd
[/etc] 

Let alone the fact that I've only posted 3 messages since Friday, all of
them constructive.

You people /really/ need to get over me, and move on.

Or filter me.  Whatever.
But, for christs sake, do it correctly.

-- 
Ken Woods
[email-masked]

---

From: Ian Hall-Beyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Dec 1998 19:27:57 -0700 (MST)

> You don't need to lockfile /dev/null

?

> the @ and a space after the colon, preferably a tab or space option

Odd, cuz I haven't seen mail from Ken in about 2 months, or about when I
added this little recipe. Mebbe it just happened to randomly work. 

> them syntactically correct.

Heh, sure, why not.

---

From: Timothy J Luoma <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Dec 1998 23:15:34 -0500

Author:	Ian Hall-Beyer <[email-masked]>
	Date:	Tue, 8 Dec 1998 19:27:57 -0700 (MST)
	ID:	<[email-masked]>

> > You don't need to lockfile /dev/null

The second colon in the first line of the recipe

:0:

is a lockfile which gets placed on the "mailbox", which is the 3rd line of  
the recipe

/dev/null

so it will create /dev/null.lock to keep other files from being written to  
/dev/null at the same time.

Lockfiles are used to prevent corruption of the mailbox.  In this case,  
since the mailbox is /dev/null, it makes no sense to have a lockfile on it.

> > Also, your From: line will never match anything as-is, you need a .*
> > before the @ and a space after the colon, preferably a tab or space
> > option
>

That is strange.  It "shouldn't" work because it isn't "correct" but if you  
say so.... still, as a model, there are improvements I would suggest in an  
attempt to achieve correctness even when it doesn't seem 100% in all cases.

(for example, your recipe could match @kensicom.com or any other domain name  
with a 'kens' and 'com' separated by one letter.... just happens to be that  
the email you want to filter has that one letter as a '.'  Real procmail  
fanatics would have you use \< and \> to delimit beginning and ends of  
strings, but I never got into that personally)

TjL

ps -- please do not CC me on any further replies, I'm on the list and don't  
need/want/desire/appreciate getting duplicate emails.  Thanks

---

From: "Colin J. Raven" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Dec 1998 22:13:21 -0800

Umm, on Sunday 7/26/98 I posted the following, specifically to deal with
Ken....
<snip>
If anyone has procmail set up, this is the perfect way to silently banish
Ken, his rantings, profanity, and generally offensive behavior...

	  :0
        *^From:[email-masked]
        /dev/null
Then, I did some reading (Ken, it's called RTFM OK?) and came up with the
following, which is probably *the* correct way to deal with the Kens of
this world...tank their mail, and autorespond 'em, informing them of said
fact!

    # This recipe will generate an autoreply header and bounce this
    # nastygram back
    # to the sender.
    # Note the lack of a c flag which means that we never see this mail.

    :0
    * ^From: .*@ kens.com
    | (formail -brt ; \
      echo "I'm ignoring your mail because you are offensive." ;\
      echo "Your email was automatically rejected by Procmail." ;\
      echo "Sooner or later, you will learn humility." ;\
      echo ""; \
      echo "                                 -me" ;\
      ) | $SENDMAIL -oi -t
## This recipe was created by Joe Gross ([email-masked]) and can be found
## in the public domain at;
## http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/workshops/procmail/bounce.html
<blah blah blah>

</snip>
But then again, he probably /dev/null'ed all my posts anyway, so he probably
never read it. I haven't read anything from him since then, so I have no
clue. By the way, for the sake of bandwidth preservation, I tanked the
autoreply, since others share the network too, but you get the general idea.
Don't lockfile /dev/null BTW, it's unecessary. There's something else that
should be escaped, I think it occurs right after kens.com, but I'm too
braindead to put it together. What you have above will work though.
The problem with this is that you will miss anything Robin writes, since
he's a user on the kens.com machine...which is a pity, since what Robin has
to say is not only relevant, but acquired through self learning, which is
doubly valuable. Robin doesn't use bandwidth for useless profanity, at least
what he says is in context, and can be a dose of reality.
Regards,
-Colin
--
Colin J. Raven
VP Operations, HDS Lab, Inc.
Costa Mesa, CA  |  Harrison, NY
http://linus.uhmc.sunysb.edu/~colin/