Adding 'nospam' to only newsgroup posts.
David Kirkby
Does anyone know of a way that I can alter the 'from' and 'reply to'
parts on posts to newsgroups ? I'd like to add words such as _nospam_
only on newsgroup posts, but not mail messages to individuals
I use netscape, which does not have such facility, but wondered if there
is any way of doing this at a lower level. I know freeware packages such
as 'snort' can search for specific occurances in the TCPIP packets, but
that can not strip them out, or add others in. I run Solaris 8 on a
SPARCstation 20.
Like everyone else I get fed up with the amount of spam, but don't want
to inconvenience every person who I send an email to with removing the
'nospam' (or similar) in the from field.
--
Dr. David Kirkby Ph.D,
email: drki...@ntlwold.com (formally da...@medphys.ucl.ac.uk)
web page: http://www.david-kirkby.co.uk
Amateur radio callsign: G8WRB
I R A Darth Aggie
David Kirkby <drki...@ntlworld.com>, in
<3A83CEB7...@ntlworld.com> wrote:
+ I use netscape,
As a newsreader? ok, ok, I know, one could use it in that manner, but
it's a dain bramaged newsreader. No scoring, it's default settings
make it susceptible to java/javascript "bombs", and I found the
interface to be clunky.
James
--
Consulting Minister for Consultants, DNRC
I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow
isn't looking good, either.
I am BOFH. Resistance is futile. Your network will be assimilated.
David Kirkby
me about it, but its the best I've come across for an all-round
solution. It is quite nice to have the lot integrated in the one
package.
--
Darrell
Groups you hit the CTRL/K keys simultaneously. This brings up a menu that
allows you to set up an identity that will only display in Newsgroups. Your
regular e-mail identity remains. Try it at
http://www.desisoft.com/fixnews/
David Kirkby wrote:
--
Darrell R. Schmidt
dsch...@home.com
B-58 Hustler History: http://members.home.net/dschmidt1/
To respond to me, remove stop from e-mail.
David Kirkby
it only works with Windows. I use a Sun SPARC.
Tony Walton
>
> I downloaded Fixnews. It works with Netscape.
It does not, however, work with Unix.
Their Web page:
FixNews works on Windows/95/98, Windows/NT 4+ and
Windows 2000.
David's headers:
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; I; SunOS 5.8 sun4m)
--
Tony
Mike Rabideau
David Kirkby <drki...@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
news:3A83CEB7...@ntlworld.com...
> Hi,
> Does anyone know of a way that I can alter the 'from' and 'reply to'
> parts on posts to newsgroups ? I'd like to add words such as _nospam_
> only on newsgroup posts, but not mail messages to individuals
>
It ain't gonna help. A month ago I switched ISPs and got a whole new email
address. I've used various -no spam- text to try to hide the real address
when posting to usenet. I haven't even updated all my contacts about the new
address and yet, today I received no less than 6 spam emails. The bastards
found me somehow, despite how seldom I post. It's a lost cause. If I only
had a good piece of hickory and some physical addresses....
Mike
--
__________________________________________________________________________
"La Longue Carabine"
Located @ |"...no elector should ever submit himself
42 49.07'N | so implicitly to party as to support a man
86 01.49' W | whose private acts prove him to be unfit
| for a public trust. The basis of the rep-
| resentative system is character, and without
| character, no man should be confided in."
-James Fenimore Cooper
Defibrillator
>Thanks for that. It sounds what I want, but according to their web page,
>it only works with Windows. I use a Sun SPARC.
>
>Darrell wrote:
>>
>> I downloaded Fixnews. It works with Netscape. Once loaded, while in News
>> Groups you hit the CTRL/K keys simultaneously. This brings up a menu that
>> allows you to set up an identity that will only display in Newsgroups. Your
>> regular e-mail identity remains. Try it at
>> http://www.desisoft.com/fixnews/
>>
>> David Kirkby wrote:
>>
>> > Hi,
>> > Does anyone know of a way that I can alter the 'from' and 'reply to'
>> > parts on posts to newsgroups ? I'd like to add words such as _nospam_
>> > only on newsgroup posts, but not mail messages to individuals
Get a proper newsreader. I use "xvnews", which (a) is available as
source, so you can make it do what you want, (b) takes things like the
username, domain and so forth from the environment so you can make it do
what you want.
I added the x-no-archive stuff for home use, which was straightforward,
and failed miserably to fix the Y2K bug in it. Yes, I know this posting
says "The unconfigured xvnews people", but that's just my laziness, not
the newsreader....
--
Regards,
Hugh.
Frank Hahn
wrote:
>> parts on posts to newsgroups ? I'd like to add words such as _nospam_
>> only on newsgroup posts, but not mail messages to individuals
>
>It ain't gonna help. A month ago I switched ISPs and got a whole new email
>address. I've used various -no spam- text to try to hide the real address
>when posting to usenet. I haven't even updated all my contacts about the new
>
One possible solution for the original poster is to set up a local
news spool on his computer and then let Netscape use that as the
server. I use slrnpull from the slrn package to do this but there
are other software programs available that do this.
After a message is posted, it goes to an out.going directory on the
local computer. For example, I have mine set up to go to
/var/spool/slrnpull/out.going/. Before you post the message, you
can then go to this directory and edit the headers if you wish to
change your email address.
The thing I like about slrnpull is that a score file can be set
up to kill articles (not download them) that match different words
in the Subject: line, From: line, etc. It works out for me at work
since I have setup a dial in line to my ISP. I can save the Usenet
posts until I go online.
At home, I have a cable connection and have slrnpull post and download
new articles once an hour. There is also a patch to slrnpull so that
it will act similiar to the Agent and Free Agent MS Windows newsreaders.
It will download headers first and then you mark the ones that you
want to download the bodies of.
I also signed up for a yahoo email address several years ago that I
use for posting to Usenet. Even with that, my main email account
at my ISP still gets several SPAM messages a day. As far I know,
that email address has only ever been given to friends and relatives.
Both at home and at work, I have setup fetchmail to grab the email
from my ISP. I just recently found a program called popsneaker that
will delete email from your account before it gets downloaded by
fetchmail. I have had it running the last 3-4 weeks and so far
it seems to be working well.
--
Frank Hahn
A sine curve goes off to infinity or at least the end of the blackboard
-- Prof. Steiner
K7MEM
David,
As someone else mentioned, simply adding "_nospam_" into your news
post address, will not do any good. The programs that scan the
news groups are smart enough to recognize this kind of thing and
strip it out. The result will still be your correct email addres.
I see many people that post with a munged address in their signature
at the bootom of the message, but forget that their address is
also in the message header.
Like you, I use Netscape on a Unix platform for reading mail and
news groups. The way I do it, however, is I read mail as myself
but news as another user. If it's your own personal machine, and
you can create other users, run two separate Netscapes. One for
mail and the other for news. Then you can do whatever you want to
the email address in the header.
Another alternative would be to run a different news reader.
One that doesn't use the same control files as Netscape. When
I am logged in over a modem, I use SLRN. Since this utility
is only for news and uses separate configuration files you don't
have to change your user status. SLRN is a good news reader and
works great through a xterm.
Good Luck
Martin K7MEM
--
Martin E. Meserve K7MEM
martin.e.meserve AT lmco.com
I respond to news groups and E-Mail on my own time and therefore
my responses may not be as timely as you, or I, would like them to
be. If I seem to be ignoring you, send me another E-Mail to jog my
memory. Opinions are my own and do not reflect the opinions of my
employer.
David Kirkby
>
> David,
>
> As someone else mentioned, simply adding "_nospam_" into your news
> post address, will not do any good. The programs that scan the
> news groups are smart enough to recognize this kind of thing and
> strip it out. The result will still be your correct email addres.
> I see many people that post with a munged address in their signature
> at the bootom of the message, but forget that their address is
> also in the message header.
I appreciate this, but I'm sure it is quite possible to invent some
combination of characters similar to nospam, that can defeat an
automatic email address grabber, but still allow a human to work it out.
As I'm sure most of us will have found at some time, it is very easy for
humans to look at ASCII files and sort out the bit they want (be it a
date, IP address, email address etc), but it's a lot more difficult to
make a programme get it right every time. I'm sure such programmes can
easily spot the very popular _nospam_, but there are lots of variations
on this.
> Like you, I use Netscape on a Unix platform for reading mail and
> news groups. The way I do it, however, is I read mail as myself
> but news as another user. If it's your own personal machine, and
> you can create other users, run two separate Netscapes. One for
> mail and the other for news. Then you can do whatever you want to
> the email address in the header.
I did consider this approach, but it is still a bit inconvenient if I
was to reply to in person to a newsgroup post. Hitting reply then gives
a mangled email address.
According to Netscape, the default port for the news servers is 119. I
was hoping there would be some way of filtering at the port level.
However, my firewall logs don't seem to show incoming or outgoing news
going to/from this port, so I'm not so sure about that.
> Another alternative would be to run a different news reader.
> One that doesn't use the same control files as Netscape. When
> I am logged in over a modem, I use SLRN. Since this utility
> is only for news and uses separate configuration files you don't
> have to change your user status. SLRN is a good news reader and
> works great through a xterm.
I'll take a look at that. I would rather not changer my news reader, but
perhaps its the only option.
I looked on Netscape's web site and it would appear netscape 6 has
support for multiple identities. I've no idea how this works, but gather
Netscape 6 is very buggy. Hence I'm not rushing to take that option.
Thanks a lot, G8WRB
David Kirkby
> Hi,
> Does anyone know of a way that I can alter the 'from' and 'reply to'
> parts on posts to newsgroups ? I'd like to add words such as _nospam_
> only on newsgroup posts, but not mail messages to individuals
>
I asked this a few days ago. Despite a lot of replies, most suggesting
swapping my news reader from Netscape, or running two copies of
Netscape, none seemed to offer a transparent method of adding _nospam_
(or similar) to my 'from' field.
I have now found what I consider to be a good solution, so I thought I'd
share it for others to consider.
Downloading a small perl script from:
http://www.antibozo.net/ogata/webtools/nntp.pl
and putting this line in /etc/inetd.conf
nntp stream tcp nowait nobody /usr/local/bin/nntp.pl nntp.pl -r
drkirkby=REMOVE_UP_TO_HEREdrkirkby news.ntlworld.com 119
has solved it. Netscape was then set up to use localhost as a news
server instead of my ISP's news server. Now any newsgroup posts result
in my email address being changed, but e-mails to individuals do not.
I'm able to reply to individuals and to a newsgroup at the same time,
with the newsgroup post being altered, but not to the individual.
I'd like to extend this so that email messages to mailing lists get
altered too, but for now at least, doing this on newsgroups is better
than no defence against spam.
Anthony Mandic
> > As someone else mentioned, simply adding "_nospam_" into your news
> > post address, will not do any good. The programs that scan the
> > news groups are smart enough to recognize this kind of thing and
> > strip it out. The result will still be your correct email addres.
>
> I appreciate this, but I'm sure it is quite possible to invent some
> combination of characters similar to nospam, that can defeat an
> automatic email address grabber, but still allow a human to work it out.
Yes, but you need to be slightly cleverer than that. Using the
obvious (like 'nospam' or something else) isn't going to help.
The arseholes who write these programs that grab email addresses
off Usenet will just keep updating them. What we need to do first
is find these arseholes and beat the shit out of them. This won't
solve the problem since their programs are already out there. But
the satisfaction this will give us will be immense. It will also
serve as a warning to other arseholes.
> As I'm sure most of us will have found at some time, it is very easy for
> humans to look at ASCII files and sort out the bit they want (be it a
> date, IP address, email address etc), but it's a lot more difficult to
> make a programme get it right every time. I'm sure such programmes can
> easily spot the very popular _nospam_, but there are lots of variations
> on this.
The cleverer programs seem to check via DNS lookups. Its easy
enough to work backwards to get the right domain and slough off
everything else. Just adding some illegal characters won't help
either. I used to do that but they have already cottoned onto that.
> I did consider this approach, but it is still a bit inconvenient if I
> was to reply to in person to a newsgroup post. Hitting reply then gives
> a mangled email address.
The issue really is "why should Usenet posts and email have the
same format"? Email is email, posts are posts. The fact that
they are similar doesn't mean that they should be interchangeable.
Unfortunately, its far too late to fix this now. But for now,
follow these guidelines -
Don't reply by email but post. Don't do both. A lot of fools
will get a bounced email on first attempt and then correct the
email address so as to reply to it and then post and email
again. This reveals the correct email address on Usenet.
Don't set a reply to. Just have an email address.
Don't use a .sig. Or don't put an email address there.
If you have sendmail configured to prevent spamming, it only
goes so far. If you are happy with that, then use your correct
email address.
If you aren't happy with that, get a webmail account. There are
plenty of free ones around. Some have spam filtering options
available. Use these to filter out the crud as in comes in. Change
the name to help prevent spamming while making it reasonably
obvious - "notmail" or "hotmale" for example. (Remember part of
the problem is spam email bouncing around the Internet. Its best
to mung the domain so as to push the problem back to the sender.
Why suffer with it at your end?)
Check your webmail account once a week or so. This is to keep it
active (or better yet don't bother even getting one. Just make it
up - that will really annoy them!). Use the filters if you want.
Ignore emailed replies to posts though. The fools who email you
should learn to post a reply instead. Ignoring them will give them
the hint.
If you can work out a valid reply address in the spam, email them
a core dump or two (dozens of times is preferable). CC postmaster
and root as well. While they're clearing out their clogged systems,
they may get the hint.
There are problably more useful tips, but this covers 99.9% of them.
At least, I haven't been bothered by spam for a good while by using
these guidelines.
-am
Anthony Mandic
> I have now found what I consider to be a good solution, so I thought I'd
> share it for others to consider.
This isn't a very good solution. As per my other post, your site
will still be receiving the spam. Said spam will have a bogus reply
address to which sendmail can't reply when informing of a non-
existent recipient. Change the domain instead so that your site
never receives the spam. That is, push the problem back to their
end.
-am
David Kirkby
> This isn't a very good solution. As per my other post, your site
> will still be receiving the spam. Said spam will have a bogus reply
> address to which sendmail can't reply when informing of a non-
> existent recipient. Change the domain instead so that your site
> never receives the spam. That is, push the problem back to their
> end.
You also said in your other post that spammers can get the domain from
the DNS lookups. In that case, is it not better to doctor the username,
not the domain ? At the risk of creating even more confusion, I've
doctored both the username and the domain name on newsgroups posts now.
I don't do this on e-mail, but would like find a way of selectively
doing this on email to mailing lists.
I don't know what the answer to spam mail is, but something needs to be
done. I think ISPs could do more, and making it a criminal offence to
trade in email addresses would be helpful. On uk.net.web.authoring, the
volume of spam is far in excess of the volume of sensible posts.
--
Dr. David Kirkby Ph.D,
email: REMOOVE_THIS_drkirkby@AND_THIS_ntlworld.com
former email address: davek@DELLETE_THIS_medphys.ucl.ac.uk
Anthony Mandic
> You also said in your other post that spammers can get the domain from
> the DNS lookups.
Yes, the software they use could be checking a domain name to
validate it after they clean it up. This isn't to say that they
will necessarily find a correct one. Just putting in something
like "XXXdomainXX.com" or whatever won't really protect you then.
> In that case, is it not better to doctor the username,
> not the domain ?
You can, but what point does it serve? If you leave the username
as is but doctor the domain name in such a way that they can't
work it out programmatically but in a way that a real person can
possibly do it intuitively, then you won't get spam hitting your
domain. But a person who wishes to email you needs to make less
effort to reach you. My "email address" is an example of this.
After many permutations, I have settled upon this as the best
compromise. This isn't to say that there are other viable ways
of doing it. But I don't receive spam any more and, as long
as no one posts and emails me with my correct email address, I
should continue not to receive spam.
> At the risk of creating even more confusion, I've
> doctored both the username and the domain name on newsgroups posts now.
Well, there's nothing wrong with that, but anyone who may be a
spammer could easily edit it and add you to their list. Its not
to hard to remove "REMOOVE_THIS_" either manually or programmatically.
It might be simpler to just have "drk...@ntlw0r1d.com" and
provide a clue that makes a world of difference - but a spammer
may manually work that out too.
> I don't do this on e-mail, but would like find a way of selectively
> doing this on email to mailing lists.
I don't have a problem with doing this in Netscape. Admittedly,
you have to manually change it depending on the requirements.
But the less you have to change the easier it makes it for you.
> I don't know what the answer to spam mail is, but something needs to be
> done. I think ISPs could do more, and making it a criminal offence to
> trade in email addresses would be helpful. On uk.net.web.authoring, the
> volume of spam is far in excess of the volume of sensible posts.
Yes, its a serious problem everywhere. I think as sendmail improves,
things may get better. But this doesn't stop the spam from getting
to your machine in the first place. Its still easy to bombard a
recipient's mail server and bog it down. But that would constitute
an attack which may be handled by the laws of most countries.
-am