Spam control at Nyx

This page is meant as a brief introduction to the anti-spam measures available to Nyx users.

What is Spam?

Spam is a commonly used term for unwanted messages in general, and especially for "Unsolicited (Bulk / Commercial) Email", as well as "Excessive Multi Posting" on Usenet News.

How do I get rid of the spam?

By setting up SpamaAssassin and Procmail configuration files.

Vance Kochenderfer has made a program to help you set up both.
Run /nyx/projects/bin/spamfilter (top,c,m,sspf in the menus) and answer the questions you are asked.

Is there any way to avoid spam?

Probably not. But, you can choose not to encourage it, by heeding the following advice:

The Terms of Service (TOS) does not allow you to post to usenet with a forged email address, but as long as it is possible for a human to deduce your identity, it is acceptable to "munge" the From: address, in order to prevent automated software robots from "harvesting" your real address.

Nyx has defined a special hostname for this purpose: blackhole.nyx.net which loops back to the senders own machine, whatever its name is.
If, for some reason, you don't like that idea, it is acceptable to munge your address into a name that isn't valid, provided that it does not end in nyx.net ! (As this would add to the burden of the mail machine, having to bounce the mail to the - possibly forged - sender address)

Munging the From: address is done in different ways in the individual newsreaders:

If you choose to munge your From: address, you probably also should add a hint in your signature, to help legitimate correspondents figure out your real address.

Encoding email addresses on your web page

With webpages, it is possible to encode your email address in such a way that it makes it harder (though not impossible) for the robots to harvest your real email address, by "HTML-encoding" it, like username@nyx.net - which Any Browser [TM] is able to decode into username@nyx.net - or by adding extra characters, and omitting the @-sign, as in "username at nyx dot net".

You can also present your email address as a picture, that is readable to humans using a graphical browser, but if you want a "clickable" link, you can html-encode the mailto:-tag, or use the CGI-email form.

External links


Casper Maarbjerg