Email filtering

[dja]

Just wondering, is procmail hit first, or is spam filtering hit first. If I have a rule that blacklists messages in my spam filtering, will my procmail have a chance to process the messages before they are dropped by spam filtering?

[augie]

Use a ".procmailrc-first" file if you want your procmail rules to be applied before spam filtering.

[dja]

that's a pretty easy fix... thanks!

[boss]

I have a question about email filtering.

I am getting a lot of spam from .ru domains. And from what I'm seeing on the email's 'cc', so are a lot of other sonic users.

Did you guys do something to anger some Russians? Kidding

My question is, what's the most effective way of blocking this? Right now I'm blacklisting. But I'm not sure I'm doing it right.
Can I blacklist all .ru email?
Can I blacklist everything from any "@mail.ru" or any other "@pickaname.ru" ?

Or do I have to continue to blacklist every email address that sends me spam?

Thanks

[dja]

You can blacklist, or you can use procmail. Procmail lets you use regular expressions and therefor can be a much more powerful tool. But, for ease of use, blacklisting is the way to go. For my work email address, I've actually blacklisted *.* and then whitelisted only email's coming from my companies domain name.

[boss]

So, if I add @mail.ru to my blacklist I will block all email addresses containing @mail.ru. Is this right? Bc it's not working.

I've never heard of procmail. Where can I read about this?

Thanks again

[kgc]

For your example, you'd blacklist *@mail.ru

Procmail allows for advanced programmatic processing of email upon delivery. You can use it to do things like discard email when a set of rules are matched or conditionally forward mail. For more inforamation see http://www.procmail.org/

[boss]

Thanks kgc and dja for your help.

[virtualmike]

So, if I add @mail.ru to my blacklist I will block all email addresses containing @mail.ru. Is this right? Bc it's not working.

*@mail.ru

[boss]

Ok. I think you are saying to add the asterisk before the @