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Election 2006 (and beyond): Digital Copyright Canada

Re: CANNING SPAM WITHOUT EATING UP REAL MAIL

From: Russell McOrmond <russell_-at-_flora.ca>
To: flora-admin-help_-at-_flora.ottawa.on.ca
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 12:08:53 -0400 (EDT)

First, thanks for the note - hopefully others will reply.

On Thu, 18 Jul 2002, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

> On 07/18/02, at 10:12am -0400, Russell McOrmond <russell@flora.ca> wrote:
> 
> >  Things are getting worse all the time with the Microsoft Viruses and
> >general SPAM.  I am in the process of investigating EXIM
> ><http://www.exim.org/> as a replacement for Sendmail. The filtering with
> >EXIM is much easier to configure than with Sendmail, which will allow me
> >to configure more site-wide filtering rules.
> 
> Russell, cannot procmail itself be used for site-wide incoming mail delivery?

  This is for messages destined to local (to that computer) mailboxes.  I
am investigating ways of dealing with SPAM that passes through the mail
server, something which procmail can't do.

> >  The question becomes: what rules?
> 
> Please block HTML alternate-part attachments.

  This can't be done site-wide.  I would personally love to be able to do
so, but it is simply not going to happen (people would be dropping the use
of the mailbox server quickly if this was enabled, and many of the
mailbox.flora.ca boxes are paying customers ;-).


> >One I want to run is a filter which will simply disallow the sending of
> >any of the standard "executable" attachment types.
> 
> How about uuencoded attachments? Any I get invariably are from trojan horse
> type thing.


  uuencoding is not an 'attachment' (MIME), but an unusually formatted
text/plain message.  This is not something I would want to enable 
site-wide.



  http://www.spamassassin.org/ looks promising as there seems to be a way 
to have the rules configured via a PHP script manipulating a MySQL 
database.  One of the problems so far is that I am unable to offer 
procmail filtering to mailbox.flora.org users given security requirements 
(no shell, no ability to run commands - and procmail rules allow the 
running of arbitrary commands).

  If anyone knows of a system to allow procmail-style filtering of 
mailboxes, but without allowing the ability to run programs, this would be 
useful.  Even a 'safe' editing tool for .procmailrc files would be useful.

Note: I have used an FTP server configured to only allow connections from 
locahost as a way to edit .forward files for vacation programs.  Something 
similar can be set up for procmail.

  The plan is to create a new mailbox server with more tools available,
and allow people to switch by choice to the new server.

---
 Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>
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