[Techtalk] simple mail filtering via whitelist - suggestions?

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 12:13:21PM +0530 or thereabouts, Devdas Bhagat wrote:
> On 05/03/04 18:58 -0500, Travis Casey wrote:
> 
> > I know of procmail and maildrop, but I've never used either of them, so I 
> > don't know how easy setting up something like this would be with either 
> > one, and they both seem kind of like overkill for a simple whitelist.
>
> Its fairly easy with procmail. Might be easier if you run your own MTA.

It probably is easy with procmail. If you have used procmail 
before and set up procmail rules before. The syntax is a 
little (okay, hugely!) off-putting the first time.

I tried to come up with a set of recipes in procmail for
this and realised a problem: it would have to be based
on "if it comes from this email address". 

Viruses and spams often make up or copy email addresses
in the hope of being read. And pretend to be addresses from
an infected computer's address book. 

And I don't know how you get around that in procmail. I
imagine the packages which set up whitelists have ways to
deal with this. I expect you can create something similar
with procmail, but I wouldn't know where to start.

For the sake of simplicity of upgrading and maintenance,
a package which specifically has such stuff in is probably
simpler. 

Telsa