Integrating Safe Words

[William Burns]

Personally, I think that schemes like this make a lot of sense as part
of an integrated defense against spam.
Even if these solutions are beyond MailScanner's (or Spam Assasin's)
scope it's worth discussing other approaches, and how they could work w/
MailScanner.

So... Anyone who wanted to write a "safe word", or a
"challenge-response" script, could configure sendmail (or whatever their
inbound MTA is) to deliver into an "mqueue-inbound". Then, have their
script pull mail from "mqueue-inbound" and drop it into "mqueue-in".

The control loop would look something like this:

> while true
> do
>
> find ${INBOUNDQUEUE} -type f -name "qf*" -print >${TMPFILE}.find
>
> cat ${TMPFILE}.find |\
> while read QF
> do
>
> IDENT=`echo $QF|sed "s,^${INBOUNDQUEUE}/qf,,"`
> if ! /bin/fuser $QF >/dev/null
> then
> # put your script here
> ./safeword-script $IDENT
> fi
>
> if [ -f ${INBOUNDQUEUE}/qf${IDENT} ]
> then
> mv ${INBOUNDQUEUE}/*${IDENT} ${MSINQUEUE}
> fi
>
> done # while read QF
>
> sleep 2
>
> done # while true



If you define INBOUNDQUEUE to be your MTAs inbound queue, MSINQUEUE to
be your MailScanner INQUEUE, and TMPFILE to be a safe filename in "/tmp"
somewhere, this wrapper will call your safeword-script for each piece of
mail.

Now a user w/ good scripting skills can write a "safeword-script" which
can maintain a different safeword for each user on the system. (or
implement quarrantine/challenge/response)

-Bill

Alex Neuman wrote:

> True, but he might want something like Scott Adams uses for his
> e-mail. If a
> certain word (Dilbert) is not found at the end of the message, he gets
> rid
> of it.
>
> This way you could give your friends (even make it a ruleset) specific
> words
> - or made up words, or proper names with weird spelling that won't
> show up
> in dictionaries - that would trigger a whitelist status.
>
> I guess this could be done using spamassassin's rules, and giving a
> rule a
> significantly negative number.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On
> Behalf
> Of Ugo Bellavance
> Sent: Tuesday, July 20, 2004 5:06 AM
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: Re: Safe Words
>
> Andy Hunter wrote:
>
>
>
>> Hi everybody,
>>
>> Please accept my apologies if this is a simple question, however I have
>> had a good search around the net for the answer.
>>
>> I would like to know if it is possible to white list email based on a
>> keyword in the subject or message, eg if a message is received with the
>> keyword "NOTSPAM" in the subject then it will automatically be processed
>> and will not be blocked as spam.
>>
>
>
> Don't you think that if such a list exist, spammers will find it and
> use it?
>
> You'd be better off using bayes...
>
>
>

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