Ximian filters don't work

mfeat · 11-29-2003, 07:36 PM

I've set up a dozen filters in Ximian to try to cut down on the horrendous amount of spam that I get and while a few emails get routed to the spam folder that I set up, most don't. I go down through the emails in my inbox and find many contain the keywords that I've set up filters for (using the message body option).

Does Ximian just not work in this regard, or is there something else I need to do to get results? One thought I had was that it's case-sensitive but it would be pretty ridiculous to have to put in all the possible upper/lowercase combinations for each keyword.

I've just started looking at the option "Pipe Message to Shell Command", if I could do my own filtering with a shell script that would be just perfect. Not finding much documentation on this subject. I'm guessing that the script gets called for each incoming email and Ximian processes the return code to determine what to do with the message. Has anyone done this or know where the documentation is? I see lot's of doc for spam-assasin but I'd rather use my own shell script if possible.

Also, if anyone knows how to do it, it would be much easier testing filters if there was a way to run a new filter against messages already sitting in the inbox. Otherwise you have to wait until the next day for a new flock of spam to see if the new filters worked. Not very conducive to solving the spam problem in a timely manner.

mfeat · 11-30-2003, 03:32 PM

Looks like my guess was correct about the shell script. I just set up a filter using option "Pipe Message to Shell Command" to reference the following:

Code:

#!/bin/bash

SPAM_WORDS="spam1|spam2|spam3"

cat | egrep -i "$SPAM_WORDS" 2>&1 >> /dev/null

if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
	exit 1
else
	exit 0
fi

To test I sent myself some email messages and if they contained any of the defined spam words they went to my spam folder otherwise to inbox. Now the only question is whether this will work any better than the regular filters on real spam emails. I'll post a followup after I get the next round of spam.

mfeat · 12-03-2003, 11:32 AM

Well, that was enlightenting. I see that spammers are putting html tags in the middle of every word in the message to avoid being detected by simple filters. Now I see the need for spamassasin which I am currently installing.