Blocking Junk e-mail

Stopping Unrequested Commercial Email
(UCE or E- SPAM).

Purhaps the best way of stopping UCE is supporting various efforts to ban this. The FTC will soon (Mid 1997) hold hearings about this (and other) forms of commercial abuse on the Internet. Please see the abuse links at: here

For the time being the other solutions are: 1) complain to sender, 2) delete the message manualy, 3) delete the message using a program with filters.
Method one does not always work well as the senders often forge return addresses, forge email headers and use single-use, throw-away accounts. Method two works, but takes time to read, decide, and toss. Method three only works for those mailers who generate LOTs of UCE (like Cyberpromo ). Even using method three, you will still receive some UCE.
These creeps are nothing, if not inventive, and blocking everything they can do is not possible.

There is a program available to subscribers of Telebyte called PROCMAIL, this program allows the sorting of incoming mail via many rules and selectable filters. An error in setting up the control files can result in all your email being deleted.
If you are not comfortable about this, do not do it.

Only those with Premium (PPP) and Shell accounts can install this, those with Pine (email only) accounts can not, as Linux shell access (at the prompt) is required.

First login normaly
Next (PPP only) run your TELNET program and log into the computer that you get your email from (either kendaco.telebyte.com or pacific.telebyte.com). Use your regular account name and email password.
Now you need to decide what level of protection you want on your email.

The file rc.mailbomb will stop you from receiving -any- message (with attachments) larger then 2 Megabytes. This is intended to stop someone from mail bombing you with large emails, intended to fill up your mailbox and stop you from receiving any email. This will also stop you from receiving a large file you -wanted-. So do not install this one if you ever want to receive large files (why you would want to is another question).

The files rc.bogusips, rc.cyberpromo and rc.common are intended to be used together, it is not recommended that you only install one. Between the three they should stop you from receiving most UCE.

The file rc.seven will block email with lewd subjects from reaching you, if friends send you email with such subjects I wouldn't install this

There are some differences between how you set up things up if your account is hosted on Kendaco or Pacific, that is to say if your email address includes @kendaco.telebyte.com or @pacific.telebyte.com.

Go here for instructions for Kendaco

Go here for instructions for Pacific

Go here for advanced instructions

It's done, the amount of e-spam you receive should now decrease:

Notes:

We are having you use a common set of filters too allow us to easily maintain the files as the types of countermeasures the creeps use
Please see the man pages on procmail and the procmail sites for more info
Shell subscribers may wish to place additional rules-files in their .procmailrc file to help sort incoming mail.
On-Line use of Pine and Pico is assumed through out.

RETURN