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How To Use Your CGI-BIN |
Anyone that sends out an unsolicited mass e-mail
should have their balls ripped off with a rusty claw hammer.
While no filtering system is perfect, you can greatly reduce the number of spam and junk e-mails that you receive using your mail program's filtering function.
You may have noticed that a lot of spam does not contain your actual e-mail address in the To: field. Spammers put some bogus address in there to hide the recipient list. Your actual e-mail address is hidden in the message header. You can take the practice the spammers use and use it against them to filter out their garbage.
The following illustration on how to set up an Inbox filter uses Netscape Communicator 4.7x, but most mail readers will have a similar function. To filter out spam:
- In Netscape's e-mail window, click on the Edit menu selection and select Message Filters
- In the "Message Filters" window, make sure that the Inbox is selected and click on the New button
- In the "Filter Rules" window, set up several filters as follows. Keep in mind that your are setting up filters which specify the e-mail messages that you want trashed if they don't meet certain conditions. These "certain conditions" are the "Filter Rules".
- Give the filter a name
- Select the "Match all of the following" radio button
- Select to or CC in the message section drop-down list
- Select doesn't contain for the filtering action
- Enter a filter value that contains your e-mail ID (your e-mail "ID" is the part of your e-mail address before the '@' symbol)
- Click on the More button to add additional filter values (see value considerations below)
- When all filter values have been entered, select Move to folder for the filter action
- Select the Trash folder as the target of the move (see the alternative below)
- Click on the OK button
- Back at the "Message Filters" window, uncheck the Log Filter Use box
When entering additional filter values, consider the following:
- Some e-mail programs will put the recipient's name in the To: field rather than their address. You'll want to add a filter value with your first or last name. (You'll probably want to use your last name if your first name happens to be "Rich", "Bill", "Tip", or "Viagra".)
- If you receive periodic e-mail newsletters or notices that you have signed up to receive, check the To: value of a recently received message or newsletter. Some do not use your specific e-mail address in the To: field. For example, I receive a monthly Paint Shop Pro e-newsletter and the To: field is
newshtml@lists.psppower.com In the above screen-shot you can see that I have a value of "psp" for one of my filters to allow these e-newsletters through the filter. Keep in mind that you'll have to find out what value is used in the To: field for any new e-newsletters or notices you sign up for in the future.
- If you use v2.x Bestdam Logger script, the portion of the script that e-mails the hit counts and logs to you uses an operation called "piping" to give your e-mail server the recipient's e-mail address. (This is done to hide the recipient list in the case of multiple recipients.) If you're using Sendmail mail server software, you'll want to add a filter with a value of "undisclosed-recipients" so that the e-mails from Bestdam Logger via a pipe are allowed through. This may be true for other CGI scripts as well.
In the above setup we specified that any mail messages not matching our filter values will be sent to the Trash folder. You'll want to do this initially so that you can look in the Trash folder for about the first month or so to make sure that nothing is getting trashed that you'd like to receive.
Once you're satisfied that your filters are set up correctly and only trashing things you want trashed, you may want to make the following change to the filter action.
Simply click on the filter action drop-down list (which should be showing Move to folder when you open the "Filter Rules" window), and select Delete. That you don't have to bother emptying the trash as often.
Filters don't actually cut down on the number of spam e-mails you receive. They'll still all be sent to you. The filter just never puts them in your Inbox so you don't have to be bothered with them.
The above filters will not filter out any spam e-mail messages that do have your actual e-mail address in the To: field, but that's becoming less and less common, which means more and more of the garbage will be taken care of by the filter.
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