"There are few things in life that annoy me as much as
spam -- and I'm not talking about the canned meat by-product
variety. Unsolicited ads are annoying in any form, but the nature
of spam is parasitic as well: it steals time and bandwidth. So, for
my money, anything that helps defeat spam is a Good Thing.
Because spam is sent out in massive batches, many people receive
the same spam at about the same time. Wouldn't it be a great thing
if the first person to receive a particular piece of spam could
send out a warning for the rest of us? That's the concept behind
Vipul's Razor, a distributed network for reporting and filtering
spam.
Vipul's Razor is written in Perl and -- as long as you've got a
working Perl install -- is very easy to set up. It took me less
than five minutes to download and install Vipul's Razor on a
Slackware 8.0 machine, and a few minutes more to configure a
.procmail script to mark spam with a distinguishing subject line.
It's also possible to leave the subject alone but add a "Warning"
header, or to simply file the offending email in a special
mailbox."
