Linux Gazette: Mailfilter- a program to protect you from spam

Jun 10, 2001, 21:30 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Matthias Arndt)

Mailfilter's a proactive spam blocker that, unlike procmail, actually avoids bringing spam onto your machine in the first place by examining your POP mailbox.

"Mailfilter is a very usable tool. It helps you to keep spam away from your mailbox. Contrary to the filtering with procmail, mailfilter filters the mail online. This means that mailfilter deletes unwanted spam directly from your POP3 account before fetchmail (or your favourite POP3 client) even sees it. This is different from procmail, which zaps the spam after it's been downloaded and is about to be put into your mailbox. (Examples of using procmail are in a recent Linux Gazette article, http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue62/okopnik.html.)

The benefit from that is that you won't download the spam anymore. This saves bandwidth and makes you a lot happier especially if you have a slow Internet link.

Mailfilter is a very good tool, easy to install and easy to maintain. You can add it to your .fetchmailrc as well, thus automating the procedure of deleting unwanted spam before downloading."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Linux Gazette: Stopping Spam on Your Linux Box (May 13, 2001)
• LinuxWorld: Ask the Geek: Fight spam with procmail(Mar 02, 2001)
• O'Reilly: Order from Chaos with Procmail (Dec 18, 2000)
• Network Computing: Tutorial -- Procmail: A One-size-fits-all mail processor(Mar 29, 1999)