Manni's blog

Multimediawise, the MIT Spam Conference 2007 was a complete disaster. I didn't much like the webcasts they used in former years which required me to install the much despised real-player, but this years youtubing was a real quality blow. There isn't much to see in those videos and there is rarely anything to hear. According to the Spam Conference website, we can thank Rob Targosz of McAfee for messing up that part.

If you are not that multimedia inclined, you should be able to resort to downloading the presentations and the accompanying papers. But that would be a bit easy, wouldn't it? To make the papers accessible only to the technically inclined, the Spam Conference eggheads provided only ISO images of something that actually contains those files.

Fortunately, I am not on Windows and reading ISO images is no big hassle. Unpacking them, giving web-safe names to the files and transferring them to my server was no big deal either.

So here they are (don't ask me what is what, though):

• Azam: Feature_space_reduction.doc
• Azam: paper-presentation.ppt
• Bekman: SMTP_Multiplexing.pdf
• Cosoi: Abstract.pdf
• COSOI: COMBINING_FILTERS.ppt
• Cosoi: Relevancies.pdf
• Dallmeyer: Return_to_Spamlet.pdf
• Dallmeyer: Return_to_Spamlet.ppt
• Eggendorfer: paper.pdf
• Eggendorfer: smtp_tar_pit_simulator.pdf
• Emigh/Thomason: Blog_spam.pdf
• Fumera: biggio06.pdf
• Fumera: biggio06.ppt
• Martin-Merino: ensemble_clas_spam-ver1.pdf
• MartinMerino: MIT.ppt
• McIsaac: Symmetrical_DNS_Entries_2-10-07.doc
• McIssacs: Symmetrical_DNS.ppt
• Mujica: RM_for_All_Email_Servers.pdf
• Mujica: RM_for_All_Email_Servers.ppt
• Segal: CEAS_2007_Live_Spam_Challenge.pdf
• Simpson: MailChannels-TrafficControl.ppt
• Trevino/Ekstrom: Relay_Header_Analysis.pdf
• Trevino/Ekstrom: Relay_Header_Analysis_Presentation.pdf
• Watlington: spam-mit.ppt

According to John Graham-Cumming, the reason for the ISO-image is that Bill Yerazunis wants people to glance over all the papers. Makes me wonder what he would have done if he wanted people to not read the papers while still publishing them.

One of the new features in Thunderbird 2.0 is that extensions can now add their own columns to the list of messages. I always thought that this sounds good and now I've found the first extension that makes use of this feature. But the extension doesn't just add any old column, it actually adds a very useful column if your mail server is running SpamAssassin.

Spamness adds a column that displays SpamAssassin's spam score in an easily scannable graphical way.

After you have installed spamness, you can easily scan your spam folder for very spammy and not so spammy mails and you can sort it by spaminess. (Install the Mnenhy extension if you don't want to sort all your folders by spaminess and if you don't want to display the spamness column in each folder).

Sorting mail with the POPFile IMAP module is very easy, training POPFile via IMAP is also easy. You might sometimes experience slight problems though, because your mail client will see messages in your INBOX before POPFile sees them. If these are spam, e.g., you get a new mail alert only to see POPFile move such messages to your spam folder as soon as you have a look.

But who says that new mail must be delivered to your INBOX? If your IMAP server is cyrus (or any other IMAP server that supports sieve scripts), you can change that and have your mail delivered to another folder. You then have POPFile monitor this other folder and move good messages to your INBOX while it sorts spam to your spam folder and mailing list emails to your mailing lists folder.

Here's how to do it:

1. Edit the sieve rules of your server. There are several ways to do that: from the command line using sieveshell and from the web using tools like the SquirrelMail avelsieve plugin or websieve.

What you need to get started is one single rule that moves all incoming mail to a folder of your choice that is not the INBOX. For example, you could create a folder named 'Incoming' and have sieve deliver all messages to that folder. Here's the corresponding sieve script:

require ["fileinto"];
fileinto "Incoming"; stop;

That's pretty easy. As you will have guessed, the fileinto statement files all messages into the Incoming folder. The stop statements simply stops further rule execution.

2. Now setup POPFile to watch the Incoming folder instead of the INBOX. Simply load POPFile's Configuration tab and make the "Watched folder no1" the Incoming folder. (If you have just created that folder, POPFile might not have noticed it yet; simply click the 'Refresh folders now!' button and the folder will appear in the folders drop-down).

3. Set the output folder of one of your buckets to 'INBOX'.

4. Hit apply and enjoy.

Your mail client will never be distracted again by messages that it isn't supposed to see anyway.

Where does SpamAssassin enter the picture? Well, if you server is also running SpamAssassin you can use sieve scrpting to get rid of spam immediately. You won't even have to bother POPFile with that crap. To have everything that SpamAssassin thinks is spam to a folder named 'spam', simply add a line to the above script. The result should look like this:

require ["fileinto"];
if header :is "X-Spam-Flag" "YES" { fileinto "spam"; stop;}
fileinto "Incoming"; stop;

Easy.

John has just announced the release of POPFile 1.0.

It was about time for a version 1.0. POPFile is very stable, does a great job, and has some pretty nice, well kept source code. There haven't been too many features added since 0.22.5, but we all thought that POPFile was old enough to warrant a version 1.0, ending the perpetual "beta" phase.

You can find the changelog on the POPFile forums and you can find a download link on our wiki.