Computer techie stuff

[robotech_master]

Upgraded to Windows SP 3 today. None of the problems other people have noticed, but then, I'm on an Intel machine.

This morning I noticed a huge increase in backscatter spam—the spam that pretends it was sent by you so that when it bounces, it lands in your mailbox. I don't know what the deal is, whether some new botnet just kicked in, or what, but I received literally hundreds of backscatter emails today, and spent a good deal of time feeding them all to spamassassin's Bayesian filter—to no avail.

Finally, I asked on the spamassassin mailing list, and they were able to help me out.

I had already discovered VBounceRuleset, but they told me how to take advantage of it.

I just had to stick a line with whitelist_bounce_relays mymailserver1 mymailserver2 mymailserver3 [...] in my user_prefs (or local.cf, but since I'm not the sysadmin I had to use user_prefs) in order to activate the bounce-checking rule. Then I added the following to my .procmailrc just before the rules that can spam into its own mailboxes.

:0:
* ^X-Spam-Status:.*ANY_BOUNCE_MESSAGE.*
bounces

And now any backscatter goes into a bounces folder and doesn't end up in Gmail, and I'm backscatter free! Yay!

Comments

[erikred.livejournal.com]

Quick Q: do you use Adobe Acrobat 7? Have you noticed an inability to toggling "Display PDF in Browser" in the Internet category of the Preferences?