Re: Maintaining ASK via email.

Hi Craig,

> First, let me offer up a BIG thank-you to Marco Paganini for creating 
> ASK and to  Kurt Werle for his contributions. Until I found your 
> solution for dealing with junk mail, I was using RBL's. When we 
> pulled all of our networking in-house two years ago, what started as 
> a very minor annoyance grew into a very time consuming task. I 
> started by fine-tuning Sendmail, and that helped. Over time I 
> graduated to RBL's and that helped. Over time, it got so bad I was 
> looking to SpamAssassin and Procmail to help. Then I found ASK. I had 
> it up and running in under 30 minutes on our worst junk-mail targeted 
> account. No more junk mail! Mine was the next. I am now at work on 
> scripts to have it help expidite installation on everyone's account, 
> and trying to figure out a way to have ASK set up automatically every 
> time new users are created! You rock Marco! Thank's again.

I'm glad ASK is helping to keep your mailbox spam-free. It's always good to
be of service.

> Now, I have an observation/concern. I noticed that in the 
> documentation that deals with the white/black/ignorelist.txt files, 
> care is given to explain that you must backslash before the period at 
> the end of the email address (somerwher\.com) to differentiate 
> between a wildcard and an actual domain name.
> 
> Yet when I send the command "ask edit white/black/ignorelist" the 
> resulting file that is returned mentions none of this and in fact 
> shows normal domain names. Thinking that maybe ask.py would 
> substitute the backslash so as to not confuse un-savvy users, I did 
> not pay it much mind, until I happened to be manually editing a list, 
> and noticed that none of the entries had a backslash. I am just 
> curious to know if this is an oversight? Can the instructions 
> returned in the email be changed to match what is in the 
> documentation (if the documentation is indeed correct)?

Usually, having an unescaped dot is of no concern. It's true that a dot
will match any character on that position, but in most cases this is
harmless. Think about "[email protected]" for instance. This expression will
match "foo@somewherexcom" for instance. Clearly, there's no such domain and
so there's nothing to be concerned about.

One thing to note is that ASK escapes the dots when it adds emails to the
whitelist. It is impossible, however, to escape dots automatically when
processing remote commands, as we do not know which dots are supposed to
be treated as a regular expression and which are supposed to be matched
literally. Perhaps, for the future, a new "exact" keyword would be in order
to force interpreting those chars literally (something as "exact from
[email protected]" in the config file).

Regards,
Paga


> -- 
> ---
> 
> Craig Daters ([email protected])
> Graphic Designer / Systems Administrator
> West Press Printing & Copying
> 1663 West Grant Road
> Tucson, Arizona 85745-1433
> 
> Tel: 520-624-4939
> Fax: 520-624-2715
> 
> www.westpress.com
> 
> ---
> 
> 
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-- 
Marco Paganini          | UNIX / Linux / Networking
[email protected]   | PGP: http://www.paganini.net/pgp/
http://www.paganini.net | Magnus Frater te spectat...


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