How to open a spam trap?

Bruce Thompson bruce at OTHEROTHER.COM
Fri Mar 28 16:46:27 GMT 2003


Hi,
     I've been running MailScanner and SpamAssassin for about a month
now and it's been a fantastic addition. There's still some spam
slipping through, but the volume is way down.

     Now it's time to start the attack back. Sort of. What I want to do
is to create a spam trap address. This is a mail address that receives
nothing legitimate. Any mail arriving at that address is guaranteed to
be spam. I've hacked up a log scanner that looks for unknown addresses
in my mail log with the intention of adding them as aliases for the
spam trap.

     For dealing with the spam, I'd like to automate things as much as
possible. The first thought is to have a procmail script that
automatically forwards incoming email to spamassassin's autolearn,
forwards to razor, bayes, etc. etc. This script will be easier to write
if I can turn off all MailScanner manipulations on incoming email on
that account. This way I have the email in its pristine form to work
with. The alternative is to have a script that processes the mail
before handing it off to autolearn et al. On the one hand this would
give me the chance to ignore email that is already correctly tagged,
but it would also require me to strip off the MailScanner headers.

     First off, what do folks recommend? Second, is there a way to tell
MailScanner to simply pass through mail for a particular user?

        Cheers,
        Bruce.



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