Email filtering

[markf]

"*undisclosed*" does not appear to be a valid email address. Please try again.
"*recipients*" does not appear to be a valid email address. Please try again.
"*undisclosed-recipients*" does not appear to be a valid email address. Please try again.

So how do you block this in the "TO" field sonic? No [@] so SA considers this not to be a valid email address.

Why can I not designate what I want to block with SA? What if I wanted to block everything from [Company A] and they use multiple domains?

The answer is simply because SA is a non-functional tool and I see it as an aid to help spammers bypass the filters people put in place and to force people to expend more time than should be required to stop spam. This is from my current filters which SA does not recognize and so does not filter.

Blacklist To
*@yahoo.com
recipients
undisclosed
undisclosed-recipients

IOW I have these terms in the filter lists but SA places the spam matching these terms in my inbox, making SA a real piece of shit that does not stop spam and/or requires me to spend hours adding shit as the spammers change up their from, subject and body. All the while the "TO" field remains the same.

I think I will go back to a global whitelist by blacklisting everything [*@*] and then whitelisting everything sent to any of my email addresses and whitelisting everything sent to my family and friends email addresses. It appears to be the only way to stop this spam sent to sets of invalid characters.

[kevinmcm]

MTA filtering by 'From' domain and/or remote CIDR would be great. Yahoo is 99.9% spam but they're not in the major blacklists yet. At least bring back a blacklist for networks with invalid abuse contacts, as that takes care of of Yahoo, Chinanet, Kornet, African cafés, and the entire country of Taiwan.

Sonic gives you the options of:

1) Use proper MTA filtering but with limited rules. Your e-mail account becomes a spam bucket that you must sift through for legit e-mails.

2) Use Spam Ass. sorting. You now have a separate spam bucket that you must sift through for legit e-mails.

Those aren't good options so I rarely use my Sonic e-mail account.

[dja]

You could always read up on procmail and then set that up. Thats one area where sonic rules! No body else gives you that level of control over your email.

[kevinmcm]

Does procmail properly refuse messages? I've been told that its only options are to bounce to the sender's e-mail address (unsafe!), rename, or delete. For the 0.1% that isn't spam, I'd like the sender to know that the message was refused.

[kgc]

Due to the way our mail servers are configured there is no way for procmail to affect the original submission of the mail to our MX servers.

[dja]

Yeah, but the traffic that hits the mx servers is sonics problem. The traffic that hits the users the inbox is the users problem. Though procmail, they can filter out messages better than through any other tool.