Subject: Spam control

From: Karl Kingston <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2003 12:13:50 -0500 (EST)

Has the Pine team come up with a way to deal with Spam?   I've been 
getting enough spam that I want to take action on.

I've looke at bogofilter and spamassassin but they seem to work under 
sendmail/procmail.

Any ideas how i can get these 2 to work directly with Pine without having 
to use external programs to process mail?

Thanks

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
 For information about this mailing list, and its archives, see: 
 http://www.washington.edu/pine/pine-info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------

---

From: Ed Greshko <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2003 01:27:01 +0800

> to use external programs to process mail?

Frankly, pine and other UA's (User Agents) should stick with being good
UA's.  I suppose you could use some of the filter functions of pine to
deal with it on a marginal basis....but if you really want to deal with
spam you'd use the tools written specifically for that purpose.  In that
regard spamassassin seems to have a very good reputation.

Regards,
Ed

-- 
http://www.shorewall.net/  for all your firewall needs

---

From: Nancy McGough <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2003 18:01:28 +0000 (GMT)

> to use external programs to process mail?

I've been doing a lot of research about this and the current darling
of spam fighting is POPFile. On my main Pine page, which is here

 <http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/>

I have a blurb in the "Pine-Related News" section at the top
about POPFile that includes links to "HOWTO: POPFile with Pine"
and a lot more.

If you don't want to try POPFile, another option is to create a
Pine filter that moves all messages that are From someone in your
address book to a "GreenBox" using a filter condition like this

 From or ReplyTo is in address book? =
            Set    Choose One
            ---  --------------------
            ( )  Don't care, always matches
            (*)  Yes, in any address book
            ( )  No, not in any address book
            ( )  Yes, in specific address books
            ( )  No, not in any of specific address books
                 Abook List = <No Value Set>

Everything else will be "possibly spam" and you'll have to go
through it and add all the non-spam addresses to your address
books so they'll get put in your GreenBox in the future.

Hope this helps,
Let us know what you decide to do,
Nancy

--
--  I N F I N I T E  I N K    www.ii.com    N A N C Y  M c G O U G H  --

---

From: "Bill Kearney" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2003 13:14:55 -0500

ImapAssassin works pretty well.  It reaches into your imap folders.

Fetchmail can be used in conjunction with imap folders to deal with moving spam.

-Bill Kearney

---

From: Karl Kingston <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2003 22:27:47 -0500 (EST)

Just tried IMAPAssassin.  Looked like it worked but I was getting an error 
when it tried to move the spam.   If my imap server doesn't allow folders, 
then what do I do?  Or can the spam be saved to a local mailbox?

---

From: "Bill Kearney" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2003 07:49:20 -0500

An IMAP server that doesn't allow folders?  That odd.  I guess you're out of
luck.

This leads back to using SpamAssassin and fetchmail in combination. There are
possibly other alternatives but the configuration you're suggesting is so odd as
to make it nearly impossible to do it "the right way".  As for local folders,
sure, but the original question was about trying to /avoid/ using such things.

-Bill

---

From: Nancy McGough <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2003 13:34:17 +0000 (GMT)

On 4 Mar 2003 Bill Kearney ([email-masked]) wrote:
>
> An IMAP server that doesn't allow folders?  That odd.  I guess
> you're out of luck.
>
> This leads back to using SpamAssassin and fetchmail in
> combination. There are possibly other alternatives but the
> configuration you're suggesting is so odd as to make it nearly
> impossible to do it "the right way".  As for local folders,

Actually I think Karl's original question was about avoiding
sendmail/procmail and finding a program that can "work directly
with Pine without having to use external programs to process
mail?"

Before we can recommend things -- and I do have some more ideas --
we need to know more about Karl's mail setup, e.g.:

* Are you using Unix-Pine, PC-Pine, VMS-Pine, or something else?

* Do you run Pine on your local machine or remotely in an ssh window?

* Is incoming mail delivered to your local system or to a remote system?

* Do you use Pine to access your *incoming* mail using IMAP, local
  system calls, or POP?

* Where do you store your mailboxes -- are they on your local
  system or on an IMAP server? or some combination?

* Do you receive mail at multiple "maildrops"? E.g., at work, at
  your ISP, at a free IMAP provider such as FastMail.FM, etc.?

Once we know more about the setup, we'll be able to help better.

Nancy
 coming soon: http://spam.defleXion.com

---

From: Karl Kingston <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2003 09:09:52 -0500 (EST)

Hi Nancy.  Answers to your questions are inline.

> * Are you using Unix-Pine, PC-Pine, VMS-Pine, or something else?

Unix-Pine 4.44 on RedHat linux 7.3

> * Do you run Pine on your local machine or remotely in an ssh window?

Run it on the local machine. 

> * Is incoming mail delivered to your local system or to a remote system?

Remote system.  If I could run sendmail or a variant, I wouldn't be asking 
this since I'd have gotten SpamAsssin (or other) to work with procmail on 
all mail.  But since I can't run anything on port 25 (Road Runner blocks 
port 25),  So I use IMAP to a remote system.

> * Do you use Pine to access your *incoming* mail using IMAP, local

IMAP.

>   system or on an IMAP server? or some combination?

They're on an IMAP server.  

>   your ISP, at a free IMAP provider such as FastMail.FM, etc.?

Not with Pine, no.

---

From: Nancy McGough <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2003 14:30:08 +0000 (GMT)

Thanks for your quick response Karl. Quick question:

Do you have shell access to the server where your mail is
delivered? If so, what are your thoughts about passing your
incoming messages through procmail *on the mail server*? My guess
is that you've rejected this option and I'd like to know why.

I will be off the Net for a while but will write more later. I'm
also curious to hear other people's suggestions.

Thanks,
Nancy

-- 
       PROCMAIL  <http://www.ii.com/internet/robots/procmail/qs/>
           IMAP  <http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/imap/isps/>
           PINE  <http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/>

---

From: "Bill Kearney" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2003 09:38:53 -0500

> They're on an IMAP server.

Would you be willing to read/store you mail on the local RH linux box?  If so,
then run either mailtutil (part of UW imap) or fetchmail to pull the mail off
the remote IMAP server (or POP for that matter) and process it locally.  You can
setup a cron job to run periodically to pull the mail.  Then your mail clients
can read them from the local IMAP server.  I do this.  I pull mail from about 6
different places and dump them all into local IMAP accounts.  I can then use
various mail client programs to access the mailboxes.  This also lets me run
ImapAssassin against those mailboxes, also driven by cron.

I also use hotwayd to pull the mail down from several hotmail accounts.
(fetchmail<-via pop3)->hotwayd<->hotmail)

If you want to leave the mail on the remote server you could, I suppose, pull it
down locally, fiddle with it and then put it back.

I generally find it's best to /move/ mail that's suspected of being spam instead
of deleting it.  I then periodically scan the folder for stuff that's over 30
days old and /then/ delete it.  Seeing as how many ISP mail accounts have size
limitations using a local IMAP server is really the only way to do this.

All this as opposed to try to make pine or any other MUA do the heavy lifting.
The mail programs generally do a good job of being just that, user mail agents.
Askingt them to get into spam handling has, so far, not been very pleasant to
use.

-Bill Kearney

---

From: "Bill Kearney" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2003 09:43:14 -0500

> is that you've rejected this option and I'd like to know why.

If it's an ISP account that uses IMAP but doesn't support folders it's pretty
likely it doesn't have shell access.

> also curious to hear other people's suggestions.

Pull them off the ISP server using fetchmail and push them onto the local
server.  At that point all the features of SpamAssassin, procmail and the like
become available.  The downsides are setup complexities and access.  The mail
being local means you'd have to get it from the local machine.  The ISP account,
conversely, might be accessible from anywhere.  The balancing act, of course,
being the size limits on the ISP mailbox.  If remote access is desired then open
up a secured sshd connection back to the home box and run pine inside it.

The benefit is the local box is a linux machine and can thus run many
server-oriented tasks.

And yes, it's mail delivery can still be pushed back through the ISP's servers,
horrible as that is.

-Bill Kearney

---

From: Karl Kingston <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2003 12:42:37 -0500 (EST)

Just a little more on my situation:

On my ISP, I have shell access.  Unfortunately, their mailserver is on 
another machine.  So this is why I rejected the idea about using procmail.

Bill K suggested running mail locally using mailutil/UW Imap/fetchmail.  I 
may be willing to do this--but I'm going to need to spend some time 
looking at this.