mail killfiling

["Craig A. Johnston" <caj@tower.stc.housing.washington.edu>]

There was some talk on the list earlier about reading the list through
news so as to be able to use kill files.  Here is an alternate way for
folks that have 'deliver' installed on their system as the local mail
agent.  (do a "grep Mlocal /etc/sendmail.cf" to see...if you don't
see 'deliver' in there somewhere, you don't.  This is provided you are
using sendmail, of course.)

First, install the following as ".deliver" in your home dir:

--- cut here ---

#!/bin/sh
# delivers all mail except that from folks in $NOMAIL

NOMAIL=.nomail
FROM=`header -f From $HEADER`

if grep "$FROM" $NOMAIL >/dev/null 2>/dev/null

then        # we don't want any mail from this person!
      exit         
fi

echo "$1"  # otherwise, deliver as usual

--- cut here ---

Now, you also need this little script that I call "killem" installed
in your home dir.

--- cut here ---

#!/bin/sh
NOMAIL=.nomail
header -f From >> $NOMAIL

--- cut here ---

Now, let's say you are in your mailbox and you see such a horrible
piece of mail from someone that you never want to see any mail from
them again. ;)  Provided you are using 'elm', (probably is a mechanism for
this on other readers.)  just pipe the message through 'killem' with
a "|" from elm and answer "killem" when asked what you want to pipe
the message through.  The From: line will be stripped and stuck
in .nomail (or whatever you change it to) and you won't see any more
mail from this person.  Of course, this is not entirely true: mail
that does not get delivered will go to a file called Undel.mail in
your home dir, which you can keep, or have a cron job deal with, or
whatever you like.  Also, if they change their 'real name' on 
their system, you'll start to get mail from them again.  (i.e.
w/'chfn' or the like.)  

This is just a quick hack I whipped up a moment ago, and could of 
course be improved/changed.  'deliver' will also run perl scripts,
and it should be relatively easy to write something that way that
will handle wildcarding and field selection.  An automated mailing
to folks upon their 'termination' could be added for those that
want to rub it in, or an automated bounce that sends mail right
back with a note that their mail is not being received.

If you want to block mail based just upon the account name and not
have to worry about them changing their "real" name, you can just add
the account name to .nomail manually.  Judicious use of the unix 'cut'
command could have 'killem' just toss the account name into .nomail for
mail coming from unixy systems, but would fail for others, so I decided
to not assume anything about the From: line.  Ought to work fine
and transparently for most folks as-is.  Ingenious folks can build
on it.

I dunno how many systems use 'deliver', but it's sort of a Linux
(slackware) default, and those using it can avoid learning procmail
with this script.

Enjoy,
Craig.