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IMPORTANT: the White Listing with Ask that is described on this page is no longer supported on the departmental E-Mail servers.

This description is left here only for historical/archive reasons.

White Listing

White Listing is a technique to build a list a mail senders allowed to send you mail. Senders not in your whitelist can send you mail, but need to register in your whitelist before their mail reaches you.

This technique can be used e.g. to prevent spam sent from unusable email addresses to reach you.

The white listing sofware installed is Active Spam Killer (Ask) .Check a  description of the principles used.

This text describes the setup for cs.kuleuven.be.

Setup

We use Ask in combination with procmail because
  • Procmail is allready installed on our machines and is e.g. used for "Vacation/Out with Office" messages.
  • Procmail can be used to handle part of your email (e.g. by throwing away Spam recognized by our anti-virus and anti-spam host dr-zook).
  • By calling Ask from your .procmailrc one can implement different strategies.

The setup of ask in integrated into setup_procmail.

  1. If you did choose automatic setup, no questions will be asked for whitelisting setup.

  2. If you did choose normal setup check here for the possible options.

  3. If you did choose guru setup you can use the manual setup description as a guidelin

Interaction with Ask by mail.

One can interact whith Ask by sending mail to yourself with special subjects. Start by sending yourself a mail with Subject: ASK HELP
( This mail must be sent with the appropriate signature. see "rc_mailkey point 3 above".)
The answer :
ASK understands several commands. All these commands are issued by sending mail
to yourself with special subjects. These subjects are:
  ask help
      Returns this message
  ask process queue
      Sends you a list of mail in your queue and lets you act on them
  ask edit whitelist
      Allows you to edit your whitelist
  ask edit ignorelist
      Allows you to edit your ignorelist
This can and must be used to clean up your .ask/queue directory:

For "subject: ask process queue" Ask will send back a mail with a short description of every mail in the ask queue:
...
ASK QUEUE REPORT

These are the contents of your ASK queue. These emails are sitting in the
queue waiting for a confirmation from the sender. Change the "N" on the left
of each email with the desired action. Actions are:

N - Do Nothing. Leave it queued.
R - Remove from queue.
D - Deliver message (but don't whitelist sender).
W - Deliver AND Whitelist sender.
I - Add sender to Ignorelist (and delete message).

Just edit the message as you wish and reply. Quotes are OK.
Queue contents:

N  16-02-04  Id: 686f1343fb97f9c26d15b50ae52e7499
             From: eldridgej@prod-infinitum.com.mx
             Subject: FWD: Get All Meds. XAna/x/ , V|AGR@ & V@1|um < Fi0

N  17-02-04  Id: b8944c031d562bc48f2aa9353f93ffa1
             From: baggett@tekmailer.com
             Subject: FWD: Get All Drugs. _XANAX_ ) V1@gra . Val/i/um _

N  17-02-04  Id: 607ca9cb6406ace42034576fd3bdc09b
             From: dljhg6jpp@tstonramp.com
             Subject: start from 20 bucks for xp pro, xp office, adobe .

...
R  07-02-04  Id: 9bd20b6df1c9cd7e346bc57778921ca0
             From: xllji4netrq@algx.net
             Subject: fat pig, plz keep fit


This email account is protected by:
Active Spam Killer (ASK) V2.5.0 - (C) 2001-2002 by Marco Paganini
For more information visit http://www.paganini.net/ask

Each description is preceded bij a action tag (e.g. N or R). Messages older than rc_remote_cmd_max_age  days (default 10) will have a R (remove).
You can edit ~/.askrc for changing the value of rc_remote_cmd_max_age.

When you reply to this mail (including the mail body) the messages with the R tag will be removed.

Beware  if you do not reply to these mails  your .ask/queue directory may grow continuously eating up all your disk space.