NOTES
SpamFree is fully configurable. The configuration is very easy. It in Tcl syntax. Don't worry it is not as cryptic as "user 'foo' there with password 'buzz' is 'bar' here". On the contrary, it is intuitive and straight forward. All the configurable variables have good default values and are well commented, which are shown below. Copy and paste the variables into the default configuration file (~/.sf.rc), and made the changes there according to your taste. The only thing you must change is the POP server's address/port and your account information. Also remember to put your procmail rules in ~/.sf.procmailrc. See the 'SPAM-related' section below.
SOURCE
# ....................................... POP3 related configuration ...
# -- account defaults
set POP_SERVER "localhost"
set POP_PORT "5058"
# The default POP server is YahooPOPs <http://yahoopops.sourceforge.net/>.
# If your ISP is my.isp.org, use the following:
#set POP_SERVER "my.isp.org"
#set POP_PORT "pop3"
set POP_USER "charly_brown"
set POP_PASS "secret"
# you must change the above account information.
# Note that the password is stored in plain text. Use the default Unix
# security mechanism to protect your password (chmod 600 ~/.sf.rc). If this
# is still not OK for you, set it to blank (set POP_PASS ""), SpamFree will
# propmt you for the password every time it is launched.
# -- maximum allowed wait time (in seconds)
set POP_WAIT_CONNECT 300; # maximum wait for POP connection
set POP_WAIT_LIST 300; # maximum wait for LIST cmd.
NOTES
SPAM configuration in controlled by the following variables:
SPAM_PROG, SPAM_FILE and SPAM_LINE.
You are free to choose whatever spam detection software you want, just
configure the SPAM_PROG variable. Each message is piped to the 'SPAM_PROG'
program by SpamFree. The only requirement to 'SPAM_PROG' program is to
read the email message from the pipe and write the spam prediction as one
digit into the 'SPAM_FILE' file. SpamFree will read the returned number
and delete the mail from the POP if it is greater or equal to 8, and hold
the mail in the POP without retrieving if it is between 1 and
7. Otherwise, the mail will be retrieved and then deleted from the server.
By default the powerful procmail is used as the spam detection software,
and the procmail script for SpamFree is ~/.sf.procmailrc. To achieve the
behavior outlined above, your ~/.sf.procmailrc file should look something
like this:
SPAM_FILE=$HOME/.sf.ret
# == sure spams
# spam!, said SpamAssassin
:0:.spam
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
| echo 9 > $SPAM_FILE
# [...]
# == mlists that I'm on, OK to retrieve
# [...]
# == might be false alarms
# not directly to me?
:0:.spam
* !^(To|Cc):.*tong
| echo 2 > $SPAM_FILE
# [...]
# == fall through all spam detection, OK to retrieve
:0:.spam
| echo 0 > $SPAM_FILE
TODO
Document how I convert my existing procmail scripts automatically for SpamFree (so that I only need to maintain one set of rules). Show how I detect spams using my procmail. But, anybody cares? SPAM_LINE determines the number of lines of the message body to retrieve for spam detection. To disable body retrieving, "set SPAM_LINE 0". The default setting for the above variables are:
SOURCE
# ...................................... SPAM fighting configuration ...
set SPAM_PROG "procmail ~/.sf.procmailrc"
set SPAM_FILE "~/.sf.ret"
set SPAM_LINE 5
NOTES
MAIL_DELIVER determines which program to pipe mail to. Use whatever MTA (mail transfer agent) you like. The default is procmail. SpamFree uses netcat to talk to the pop server. The netcat is called nc in some systems, and netcat in other systems. Set its name in the the NETCAT variable. The 'verbose' variable determines how noisy SpamFree is. Use the -v command line option to set it. Refer to below 'command-line' section.
SOURCE
# ...................................... email deliver configuration ...
set MAIL_DELIVER "procmail "
# ........................................... Misc constant settings ...
set NETCAT "nc"
set verbose 0
# verbose:
# 0 - be quite, do not show anything except error messages
# 1 - show one dot when processing each email
# 2 - show POP3 command sent and server respond
# 3 - show full interaction, including password, email headers and bodies
# 4 - show full debug info, including Expect internal status, HUGE output!
# You don't need to touch this section unless you know what you are doing
set prompt_ok "\r\n\\+OK"
set prompt_ok_line "$prompt_ok \[^\n]*\r\n"
set prompt_done "\r\n\\.\r+\n"
NOTES
Use sf -h to obtain a brief usage description. Try using 'sf -v -v -v -m 2' to test run it for the first time after you've done the configuration, to verify that you've got the pop server and your account settings right. After you've get used to it and get confident with it, you can decrease the number of -v used and increase the maximum number of messages to download, or even omit the -m parameter entirely. If you have more than one POP3 need to be checked, I suggest you create configuration files as .sf.rc.isp1, .sf.rc.isp2, etc. Then use the following sh script to check them one by one: for sf_cfg in my/path/.sf.rc.*; do sf -c $sf_cfg; done If you have high speed connection, you can check all POPs simultaneously with the following sh script. But be sure to set and use a different SPAM_FILE file for every simultaneously connection. for sf_cfg in my/path/.sf.rc.*; do sf -c $sf_cfg &; done Note, if you want to send me bug report (to the bug report forum on sourceforge), be sure to set SpamFree to maximum verbose mode, i.e., sf -v -v -v -v