Filter spam/virus from POP3 servers?
Guillaume Filion
I'm trying to clean up my mailbox (get rid of viruses and spam) but I
must say that I'm quite puzzled by the tons of various possible options.
I hope someone will know a (simple) solution for what I want to do.
Here's my situation:
I get mail on a Mac using Eudora. I have a Linux boxen on the same LAN
as the Mac. Both are connected to the Net with a cable modem. I get my
mail from 3 different POP3 servers.
What I taught of doing was:
1. Get the mail from my POP3 servers to my linux box (using fetchpop).
2. Filter the mail on the linux box using spamassassin and an antivirus
package.
3. Set up a POP3 server on the linux box to serve the filtered mail
(using qpopper as POP3 server).
4. On the Mac, get my mail from the linux box.
I'd like to know what you think about this, and how to make it work on
the linux box... especially, how to feed the output from fetchpop into
spamassassin and the antivirus software. Also how to put it on the mail
spool for my POP3 server to catch it.
I'm pretty sure that there's a not-too-hard solution for this, but I'm
not very familiar with mail delivery, so I'm must say that I'm quite
confused by all the possible configurations (i.e. sendmail).
Thanks a lot,
GFK's
PS: The Mac is running MacOS9 and is too slow to run OSX efficently, so
no unix on this mac...
--
Guillaume Filion
Logidac Tech., Beaumont, Québec, Canada - http://logidac.com/
PGP Key and more: http://guillaume.filion.org/ (this will redirect)
PGP Fingerprint: 14A6 720A F7BA 6C87 2331 33FD 467E 9198 3DED D5CA
frater mus
Hash: SHA1
12 Jul 2002: Guillaume Filion <g...@logidac.com> wrote
> What I taught of doing was:
> 1. Get the mail from my POP3 servers to my linux box (using fetchpop).
>
> 2. Filter the mail on the linux box using spamassassin and an antivirus
> package.
>
> 3. Set up a POP3 server on the linux box to serve the filtered mail
> (using qpopper as POP3 server).
>
> 4. On the Mac, get my mail from the linux box.
Sounds fine.
> the linux box... especially, how to feed the output from fetchpop into
> spamassassin and the antivirus software.
Use procmail to feed it to your other apps, perhaps.
>Also how to put it on the mail
> spool for my POP3 server to catch it.
The pop3 server will read the mailspool. No biggie. Only weirdness
is that if you use SA/procmail to file stuff into local folders I don't think
the pop3 server can get to it.
> I'm pretty sure that there's a not-too-hard solution for this, but I'm
> not very familiar with mail delivery, so I'm must say that I'm quite
> confused by all the possible configurations (i.e. sendmail).
Corrections welcomed, but this seems like the setup to me:
Step one: fetchpop/fetchmail -> procmail (spammassin, av)[0] -> mailspool
Step two: POP3 from mac <- mailspool
jc
[0] Clean mail makes it to the mailspool, with spam and virii shunted off
to folders or /dev/null as needed. Or you might want to pass
viruses/spam along to your mailspool with altered headers so you can
filter on your Mac.
- --
L.V.X., brother mouse
http://www.mousetrap.net/~mouse/
http://www.mousetrap.net/otr/ Old Time Radio
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Rod Smith
Guillaume Filion <g...@logidac.com> writes:
>
> I'm trying to clean up my mailbox (get rid of viruses and spam)
> I get mail on a Mac using Eudora. I have a Linux boxen on the same LAN
> as the Mac. Both are connected to the Net with a cable modem. I get my
> mail from 3 different POP3 servers.
>
> What I taught of doing was:
> 1. Get the mail from my POP3 servers to my linux box (using fetchpop).
Do you mean fetchmail? Or is fetchpop another tool that does something
similar? Using fetchmail for this will certainly work. I do this on my
system, although I have only two external POP sources at the moment.
> 2. Filter the mail on the linux box using spamassassin and an antivirus
> package.
I don't use Spam Assassin, but I've got a bunch of custom Procmail
filters to do this job. Overall, they work fairly well, especially on
worms. E-mail me if you'd like me to send you my filter set. (You'd need
to customize my filter set for your system, since it's got a few
site-specific features.)
> 3. Set up a POP3 server on the linux box to serve the filtered mail
> (using qpopper as POP3 server).
>
> 4. On the Mac, get my mail from the linux box.
This will certainly work. You might consider using IMAP instead of POP
locally. That'll let you store mail folders on the Linux box, which
could be handy if you want to use multiple systems as mail clients. You
could then access your stored mail from Linux, for instance, if you ever
needed to do so.
> I'd like to know what you think about this, and how to make it work on
> the linux box... especially, how to feed the output from fetchpop into
> spamassassin and the antivirus software. Also how to put it on the mail
> spool for my POP3 server to catch it.
Again, I don't know about anything called fetchpop. With fetchmail, you
just create a rule that injects the mail into the local system's mail
spoool. For instance:
poll mail.abigisp.net with proto POP3
user "yourusername" there with password "your-pw-here" is
yourname here options fetchall forcecr
This configuration in .fetchmailrc will get mail from mail.abigisp.net
into the local mail queue, addressed to the user yourname (which could
be your regular account or a special mail-handling account). If you use
Procmail to filter mail, you then create a .procmailrc file in the
account that receives the mail, and it'll handle the filtering jobs. I
believe Spam Assassin interfaces through Procmail, although I'm not
positive of that.
Most POP or IMAP servers read mail from the regular mail spool, so
there's no special configuration required for that. Some IMAP servers
require particular files or directories in which they store mail
folders, but details vary from one IMAP server to another.
> I'm pretty sure that there's a not-too-hard solution for this, but I'm
> not very familiar with mail delivery, so I'm must say that I'm quite
> confused by all the possible configurations (i.e. sendmail).
The default configurations usually work well or require little
modification to work. I recommend you just start installing the
components you need one by one and then testing them. (For fetchmail,
be sure to test with the --keep command-line option so that you don't
lose any messages it retrieves, in case some subsequent step loses the
messages.) For instance, try local mail delivery (one local account to
another), then install a POP or IMAP server and try recovering such
mail from your Mac, then install your anti-spam package and test it,
then install fetchmail and see if it works. You can try these in other
orders, too, and in fact you may need to do fetchmail before the
anti-spam tools, depending upon how they work.
--
Rod Smith, rods...@rodsbooks.com
http://www.rodsbooks.com
Author of books on Linux & multi-OS configuration