[ILUG] anti-spam thing...

[Justin Mason]

"John P. Looney" said:

>  Is it possible/advisible to send back a message to the person that sent
> you a spam ?
> 
>  I'm thinking something that looks like a mail bounce, but to a human
> looks like a "sorry, but your mail looks like spam. If it's important, 
> checkout the following reasons it was spam, and try send it again" type
> response...

There's a guy posted to the SpamAssassin-talk list with a procmail recipe
for just this, about a week ago.

I'm thinking of implementing it, directly in SpamAssassin, at some point,
too (don't like relying on procmail).  I would accept patches, if you're
interested ;) -- there's already a big chunk of similar code to handle
the "user has mailed a SpamAssassin spamtrap" case in there.

Tips:

    - don't use your real email addr in the From:, use a /dev/null
      address.  Then if they scrape it, it's no good anyway.

    - provide a password so they can simply resend the msg with the pwd,
      and their mail will definitely get through.  Spammers will never
      bother with this anyway, as their mail's From address is usually
      either forged or shut down by that stage.  (this is similar to how
      spambouncer handles it)

    - (for SpamAssassin use:) if they reply with the password, run
      "spamassassin -W" to whitelist their address permanently,
      and it won't happen again (to them at least)

    - Put your real email addr in the message body, so they'll know
      what the hell the mail is talking about ;)

    - don't reply to Precedence: bulk mails.  (avoid accidental
      list-spamming)

    - don't use Reply-To to figure out who to reply to.  (again, avoid
      accidental list-spamming)

--j.