FriendlyGreeting is Expanding

[Ken Rice]

On Wed, 13 Nov 2002 08:28:27 -0800
Steve Evans <sevans at FOUNDATION.SDSU.EDU> wrote:

> I am ready to just block all e-mail.

how about yahoo, hotmail, web2mail, msn.com...  8-)

> I attached the two possibilitys now according to Mcafee.  Does anybody
> have a long term solution for these guys.  I believe the rule that
> Julian suggested adding to spam.assassin.prefs.conf only covers the
> first one.

I have the "luxury" of running servers for our corporation, including lists for our customers,
so we have no "public" users. (We're a liberal corporation, but with no 'Net policies).
Since email passing through our email server(s) are supposedly only business-related, I use 2 approaches.

One is sendmail based, in my sendmail.mc I have:

LOCAL_RULESETS
F{JunkSubs} /etc/mail/junksubs.txt
F{SSJunk} /etc/mail/ssjunk.txt

HSubject:       $>Check_Subject

SCheck_Subject
R$={JunkSubs}$* $: NMJUNKSUB
R$* $={SSJunk} $*       $#error $: NMJUNKSUB
R$* NMJUNKSUB $*        $#error $: "553 Rejected"

my ssjunk.txt includes:
e-card
greeting.card
greeting.cardyou.have.an.e-card
you.have.a.greeting.card.from
along with many other phrases/words from v*agra on, including some sick stuff.

In my spam.assassin.prefs.conf (mailscanner-3.26-1):
blacklist_from  *@*.friendgreetings.com
blacklist_from  *@friendgreetings.com
blacklist_from  *@*.friend-greetings.com
blacklist_from  *@friend-greetings.com
and many others. I believe the above format to be correct, but, anyone,
pls critique, 'cause it appears to work for me.

(Is a TAB really necessary after the "blacklist_from" ?

But, as I mentioned this is corporate, so if an employee does complain that
they aren't getting some "legit" email like an e-card, I try to nicely explain
why they're blocked. (or am I really being a "nice" BOFH??)

Anyway, MANY THANKS to Julian Field, as with Mailscanner, SpamAssassin and the
expensive Sophos, upper-level here is QUITE impressed with how we can tweak our email flow.
And, it's just one more example of a great, reliable open-source software, running on Linux here,
so much that I'm within an inch of convincing them that our primary *nix platform for Oracle
should now be Linux.

Sorry for the ramble,

Ken Rice
The Library Corporation
(first commercial CD-ROM made (with Hitachi back then) in the world)
http://www.tlcdelivers.com

Yeah, serversANDsolutions.com is my domain, but they let me work from home a lot for many reasons.

opensource, of course!