Re: w3 under development or not?

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Fri, 14 Nov 2003, pete_lee@swbell.net wrote:

> I was getting about 50-80 of those a day myself for a while... I
> wrote a perl script to parse a .spam file containing one regex per
> line.  If any of the regexes in the .spam file match the author or
> subject in the mail on the server, it's deleted on the server.  I
> mainly just focused on the service packs as they took so long to
> download.  I'm a perl novice, so I'm sure this code could be reduced
> to about 10 lines by someone that knows the language better.
> 
> Here's a snippet from my .spam:
> 
> critical.*update
> critical.*upgrade
> customer.*bulletin
> public.*assistanc
> internet.*system
> security.*pack
> security.*update
> security.*patch
> delivery.*system
> microsoft
> 
> And the script (I called pop-spam.pl) I just call with no arg for
> preview: 'perl pop-spam.pl', and 'perl pop-spam.pl delete' when I'm
> certain of my regexes.

This is a really dangerous recommendation.  If you just want to
eliminate executable attachments, which you seem to be trying to do,
use something like this Procmail recipe:

:0 H
* ^Content-Type: multipart
# check body for executable filenames
{
  :0 B
  * name=.*\.(exe|bat|pif|com|lnk|scr|vbs)(")?(\ *|\t*)$
    {
     :0
     /wherever/spam
    }
}

or install a program designed for that purpose, e.g. SpamAssassin.
Matching regular expressions against the subject is risky - are you
sure you will never want to find out about security packages, or
receive mail from people at Microsoft?

It's even riskier to delete message you haven't seen, but that's your
choice.

Ted