[vox] ricochet

[William Kendrick <nbsMAPS@sonic.net>]

I just installed a perl script called "Ricochet" on my ISP account.

  http://www.vipul.net/ricochet/


It's quite nifty, sets itself up, has very good documentation, and pretty
easy-to-understand configuration files.


What does it do, you ask?  You feed it a piece of spam e-mail and it does
all of the tedious whoises and nslookups to determine _where_ the spam
originated, and forwards it to the appropriate abuse/postmaster addresses
responsible. :)


Very nice! :)  Most people simply delete spam as it comes in.  I always
thought that simply didn't help solve the problem as a whole.  Back when
I had far too much free time, I would examine the headers manually
and do all of the network tracing by hand.

Lately, I haven't had time, so I've collected nearly 15MB of spam - about
1700 messages, in the last two months alone! :)

But now, rather than having to simply [D]elete it all, I can now type
[S] (which I've bound to a command pipe in Mutt) to have Ricochet report
it for me. :)  (It even backgrounds itself, so it takes zero time on my part!)


Anyway... I highly recommend it! :)   I'm also vaguely looking into another
spam reporting perl script named, simply, "spam.pl":

  http://spam.sourceforge.net/


It's not documented quite as lovingly as ricochet, and sounds like it might
not be quite as robust, but it does appear to have one advantage... it sounds
like it actually examines "http://"; URLs and e-mail addresses embeded in
the body of messages, not just the mail headers.*


Anyway, enjoy! :)  Happy new year, everyone!

-bill!

* - Simply killing a single account used by a spammer obviously doesn't help
    _too_ much in the long run.  It deters them, though.  But if you get their
    website taken out, there goes their revenue (whatever piddly amount
    their idiotic scheme may be collecting from the dumbest of the victims).

    Most web hosting services, especially free ones, are very much against
    spam and/or commercial content, so they appreciate getting spam reports
    too, even if the e-mail ITSELF didn't come from their servers.


    
_______________________________________________
vox mailing list
vox@lists.lugod.org
http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox