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Email security [solved]


viking777
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Up to date I have never had any bother with email security thanks to that wonderful program 'kshowmail'. Unfortunately it looks like all that is going to change pretty soon.

 

I have said enough about KDE4, I just don't want to use it and even if I did the present version of it refuses to update unless it removes kshowmail. For me that means that KDE4 is going to be removed, not kshowmail. But there comes the next problem. I have tried XFCE, I like it, but I can't make it do what I want to do. I have tried Gnome, I don't like it, but I can make it do what I want to do (with enough effort). So it is going to be Gnome for me in future like it or not. This finally leads me on to the point of this post.

 

Astonishingly Gnome does not have an equivalent to kshowmail. It has a bucketful of mail checkers, but nothing that will allow you to read and delete mail from the server as kshowmail does. Also I have failed in my attempts to get kshowmail to work on Gnome - I can get it to install and run but not to connect to a mail server. Since I do not want to change email servers (they do have a google mail applet that performs the function that I want but as I say I don't want to switch) I now will have to rely on filters in Thunderbird to sort junk mail unless somebody out there knows of a kshowmail like program that does run under Gnome?

 

Assuming such a program does not exist (and I have tried hard to find one) how do you set up filters (or otherwise deal with) the kind of spam that spoofs the 'From' address so that it is your own address that appears to be sending it? Blacklisting your own email address does not seem like a good idea, and trying to blacklist on 'Subject' is a guessing game that could go on for eternity. So what do you do?

 

Lastly a word to any Gnome devs out there. Please, pretty please, start working on 'gshowmail' - such a program is an absolute necessity in this day and age.

Edited by viking777
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I use Popfile:

http://getpopfile.org/

It is present in the official repositories. When installed, you use it as a proxy to your POP accounts, ie: Fetchmail fetches mail on localhost (popfile), and popfile transmits all POP commands to the real servers. All mail going through popfile is analysed using statistics on words. You define categories, and popfile quite easily learns in what category a new mail should go in (you have to teach it).

 

My complete mail solution is:

— whatever IMAP-aware mail client (evolution, thunderbird, kmail…) ;

— postfix in Maildir mode for mail delivering, and for sending mail, and for some filtering and redirecting ;

— bincimap for accessing mail in the home directory's Maildir ;

— fetchmail for fetching mail on external servers and storing them locally through postfix ;

— popfile for automatic categorization of all incoming mails.

 

Yves.

Edited by theYinYeti
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Thanks for those replies.

 

Ian, cgmail is just a mail checker, nothing else, Gnome has shed loads of those, in fact I have 'Mail Notifier' running at the momet. It is fine, but not capable of deleting anything from the server.

 

Yves. Thanks for that, but it looks so complicated I'd be bound to screw it up!!

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I think I might have solved this for myself. What I hadn't appreciated before is that you don't actually have to change email providers in order to use google mail, you just set up an account and then organise a redirect filter for all mail from your usual mail provider (leaving a copy on the server in case you don't trust it). You then install 'checkgmail' and you are ready to go.

 

Or at least I think that is how it works. I can't actually tell for certain yet because my default email provider has been offline all day today(the first time I ever remember that happening in 3 years) - a great day to be trying out email alternatives!!

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I use Popfile:

http://getpopfile.org/

Yves,

 

this sounds interesting. Can you expand a bit on function of the different parts? To me your setup seems an alternative to fetchmail --> procmail --> local maildir/mbox/MH (dependant on client), which I have never been able to get working satisfactorily. Also is your setup is popfile using a common set of rules to separate spam/ham or is this per-user?

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What about kde 3.5 as an alternative for as long as it's around. I have it running with 2009.0 and it's stable.

 

That goes without saying Silver Surfer, I will certainly use it as long as it is around and it is my default KDE distro (although I do use others as well). It is just the boy scout in me that likes to 'be prepared'. But more than that, I like testing new stuff and already if you use KDE4 on Cooker it will not update unless you remove kshowmail and it installs a version of Krusader that is so corrupted that it deletes the contents of files simply by opening them. Since these two programs are probably my most used and favourite apps I can no longer test Cooker with KDE4 on it so I either stick where I am on KDE3 and give up testing or I move to Gnome.

 

BTW Now that my isp's email server is back up again I can say that my kshowmail replacement solution definitely works and works well. Not only that but google mail has some very impressive spam filtering techniques (and other features) which probably make it even better. So I will mark this as solved.

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My config isn't actually all that hard to setup. Let's review it point by point.

 

— whatever IMAP-aware mail client (evolution, thunderbird, kmail…) ;

 

Nothing special there. Just your usual mail client with an IMAP access.

 

— postfix in Maildir mode for mail delivering, and for sending mail, and for some filtering and redirecting ;

 

That's a bit more involved. The key post here is this one:

https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?s=&...st&p=315105

 

Note that although the linked post (with the details) is about an issue I had, the configuration is OK, just Postfix (the software) had a problem, and it's solved now.

 

Note also this interesting possibility: I use Postfix' “header_checks†file to build upon what Popfile concluded and act further. In my case, when Popfile says the mail is for both my wife and I, the mail is moved to a shared local user, hence to a shared local IMAP mailbox.

 

— bincimap for accessing mail in the home directory's Maildir ;

 

BincImap is the easiest part: You install it, it works! That's all!

 

— fetchmail for fetching mail on external servers and storing them locally through postfix ;

 

Your standard fetchmail config file, except that “USER at host ISP†gets replaced with something like “USER#ISP at host localhost†(I don't remember the exact syntax), due to the use of Popfile as a proxy.

 

— popfile for automatic categorization of all incoming mails.

 

Install Popfile, start it, and all else is done in a nice web GUI :) You define categories, and each time you receive mail, you review the classification and correct it when it's wrong. Popfile then does less and less classification errors.

 

Also is your setup is popfile using a common set of rules to separate spam/ham or is this per-user?

The rules are system-wide. However:

— You can tell Popfile that Yves' SPAM goes in category “SpamForYvesâ€, and Iris' SPAM goes in category “SpamForIrisâ€, and in the long run, as Popfile does statistics on all words from the mail (both header and body), it will understand the rule and apply it by itself (mostly).

— For special emails, you can short-circuit the statistics and define rules based on the sender, the receiver… and so on.

 

Yves.

 

(Edit: changed IHM —French— to GUI)

Edited by theYinYeti
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