The FreeBSD Diary

I'm not running Spam Bouncer right now.  I did use it for a while, but I didn't have time for the fine tuning which needs to be done after installation.  I'll hopefully come back to that soon.

I use a Windows mail client (Pegasus, it's free and built in New Zealand).  So I have configured everything for use with Pegasus (which is a POP client).  You won't want to follow these instructions if you don't use POP.  If you don't know whether or not you use POP, I suggest you read the Spam Bouncer home page (URL is above).

I will assume you already have procmail installed and working.

mkdir ~/procmail
cd ~/procmail
fetch http://www.spambouncer.org/spambnc.tar.Z
tar xvfz spambnc.tar.Z

You can get a sample procmail.rc file from http://www.spambouncer.org/procmail.rc. I used this file for setting up Spam Bouncer.  I saved this file as ~/.procmailrc

I learned how to do this by reading Getting Started With Procmail.

This is a directory which must exist.  Make sure you create it.

MAILDIR=${HOME}/Mail

So I created it:

mkdir ~/Mail

And the backup directory:

mkdir ~/Mail/backup

These are the changes to ~/.procmailrc that I made:

This is where my mail is normally delivered by sendmail.

DEFAULT=/var/mail/dan

If you are using Eudora, Pegasus Mail, Netscape, Internet Explorer, or another Windows- or Mac-based POP email program, you will want to make these changes:

ADMINFOLDER=${DEFAULT}
BULKFOLDER=${DEFAULT}
BLOCKFOLDER=${DEFAULT}
SPAMFOLDER=${DEFAULT}

Spam Bouncer will add special headers to the mail message.  You can use this to filter your incoming mail if you are using a POP email client.  Please read this for more information:

http://www.spambouncer.org/#SpecialInstructionsForPOPMail

Change the following to be a valid reply-to address which will be used when sending messages to spammers.  Don't use this example:

ALTFROM=nospam@example.org

Here's how I did that from my /etc/mail/virtusertable file:

grep @ /etc/mail/virtusertable |awk ' {print $1}' > ~/.myemail

But that left some comments in the file:

#
#
#address@somedomain.org

I removed them like this:

grep @ /etc/mail/virtusertable | grep -v ^# | awk ' {print $1}' > ~/.myemail

Check the contents of ~/.myemail before you proceed.

I was able to get Spam Bouncer running.  Remember that procmail can be CPU hungry.