Repelling the Invaders

Repelling the Invaders

Email is, without doubt, the one true “killer app” in the age of the Internet. But its value also has a downside. Everyone has undoubtedly noticed the ever-expanding size of their email inboxes over the past year. A seemingly ceaseless stream of spam tests my patience with email every single day. I can’t live without email, but I can’t have email without spam. Regardless of how robust your filtering system is, there always seems to be a way for those who want to sell you something to find their way into your inbox. Personally, I think the increase in spam is the result of desperation on the part of failing dot-coms, but I could easily be wrong. Regardless, we who spend much of our lives connected to the electronic frontier are always looking for a leg up on the spammers.

Today’s GnomeTWEAK is a program, stock in all major distributions, that can go a long ways toward repelling the evil inbox invaders. It’s called procmail and, with some care and tuning, can drastically reduce the amount of spam in your inbox. That’s a great benefit, but it’s not all procmail has to offer. It can also filter your mail into the appropriate folders, send out auto responses, and a wealth of other tasks too mundane to mention.

While relatively simple to set up, using procmail does require some research and effort. Can you see another week-long series on the way? You’d be right if you thought so. Using procmail requires some understanding of regular expressions, email headers, interaction with sendmail, and an ability to tie it all into your favorite Linux email program. That’s where we’re headed over at least the next week in the GnomeTWEAK section. I’ll show you how I’m using procmail to repel the invaders as well as to organize and simplify the huge stream of email through my inbox each and every day.

As I’ve said, setting up procmail is fairly easy, but it does require some research. For today, I’ll point you to some great resources for setting up and using procmail on your Linux system. Call it homework, if you will. Regardless, following these links and reading the information contained within them will make following the tweaks the next week or so much easier.

• The procmail home page
• The procmail man pages
• U of Delaware mail filtering pages
• Aracnet procmail howto
• Procmail Quickstart by Nancy McGough
• Getting Started With Procmail

There you go - a bit of background to get you ready for using procmail to filter, slice and dice the volumes of email that pass through your Linux box.