This is my (Maxim Markevitch's) junk email filter - a set of procmail rules - which you are welcome to use. It takes care of 99.9% of my junk mail and almost never cathes legitimate mail. Messages identified as junk go to 2 special folders (sure junk and questionable junk), and a header "X-junk_filter" is added showing the traps that were triggered. The following files are needed under UNIX (this tar.gz file contains them all):

• .procmailrc (in your home directory) - General setup, including filenames for all the other files and the directory to put them in, and spam score thresholds.

• junk_filter2 - The main file with filtering rules. Check and edit if needed (esp. if you are not at CfA), otherwise it may reject some of your legitimate mail.

• trustaddr - A list of trusted sender addresses. Mail from those will always pass, before any checks.

• trustdomain - A list of trusted sender domains (like .edu). They will be assigned lower spam scores.

• trustbody - A list of trusted words in message body, which will decrease the spam score.

• myaliases - A list of your mail aliases. These are your own, single-person addresses; mailing lists and group aliases that you are on should be included in mylists below.

• mylists - Legitimate mailing lists and group aliases you are in. Your own (one-person) aliases should be listed in myaliases above.

• realname - Words constituting your real name, including any variations under which your friends may list you in their address books, in all languages that you use (one word per line; case-insensitive in ascii but case-sensitive in non-ascii charsets, so include all versions; can be partial words).

• legitforgers - (optional) A list of domain names known to generate headers that look like forgeries (e.g.: Received: from mail.rssi.ru (ns2.space.ru [...])), to be excluded from the forgery tests.

• vacation_fork - A file to edit to use the vacation program (and to forward your mail elsewhere).

• forged_hostname - A perl script which attempts to detect forged headers (called from junk_filter, you do not have to edit it).

• decode_attachments - A perl script to decode text attachments (or the whole text message) sent as quoted-printable, to improve the chances of catching junk. It also converts cyrillic text to koi8-r from other encodings using this perl module from cpan.org (works in most cases).

• You may also create a personal blocklist, whose filename should be defined in .procmailrc.

• Unless procmail is used system-wide for mail delivery (as it is here at HEAD), you also need a .forward file with the following line:

  "|IFS=' '&&p=/opt/local/bin/procmail&&test -f $p&&exec $p -Yf-||exit 75 #maxim"
  

  where you need to replace maxim with your local username and set the correct procmail path. (If procmail is used system-wide, no .forward file is needed.)