Spam or Virus mails from Redhat ?

[Andrew Konosky]

Scot L. Harris wrote:

>On Fri, 2004-07-16 at 04:03, Parameshwara Bhat wrote:
>  
>
>>Hello list,
>>
>>This week I have been receiving numerous mails from ***@[***]redhat.com 
>>all 174 or 173 KB and with chinese looking junk characters in the body and 
>>either a zip or pif attachment. I haven't clicked on the attachemnt though 
>>I presume these cannot run on my Fedora box.
>>
>>I also receive similar mails from various other sites as well all similar 
>>in body and attachment. Where could this be coming from ?
>>
>>    
>>
>
>You would need to examine the headers of the mail messages to see where
>they came from.  However, a lot of the information in the header can be
>falsified in order to obscure the sender.  Most likely the messages came
>from a windows box that has been taken over and is now a zombie running
>mass mailings of spam.  The from information is almost guaranteed to be
>bogus.
>
>Ultimately it really does not matter where the messages came from.  The
>best thing to do is use a tool to filter them out.
>
>  
>
>>Does anybody know of a mail-client which can be taught not to download 
>>suspicious looking mails ?
>>
>>Parameshwara Bhat
>>    
>>
>
>I think firefox and the newer mozilla (for windows at least) has built
>in spam filtering.  Not sure if that is built in to the Linux version or
>not.
>
>You can implement spamassassin on your linux box to filter spam.  On my
>home account I get about 150 or 200 spam messages a week.  Only 3 or 4 a
>week end up in my inbox.  Depending on the client you use and how you
>get your email you can configure spamassassin a couple of different
>ways.  The easiest, and the one I used at home, was to configure a
>filter in my email client to call spamassassin on messages I download. 
>The filter then looks at the results and if it is marked as spam it gets
>dumped in a holding folder.  This gives you a chance to review the spam
>messages for any false positives.  What is neat with spamassassin is
>that you can setup a bayesian database which will learn what you call
>spam and ham.  So over time it gets better and better at sorting things
>out for your particular email.
>
>Check out their web site and the documentation that comes with
>spamassassin.  Highly recommended.
>
>If you are running a full blown mta then I recommend implementing
>greylisting as well as spamassassin.
>
>
>  
>

I got junk like that all the time in Windows, so I started using the 
Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail program, which has built-in jumk mail 
filters. Now I use it under Linux as well. Works pretty good! And the 
nice thing about any non-windows system is that you really don't have to 
worry about viruses, because there are very few, if any that can affect 
you. 99% of computer viruses are written to attack 
technology-challenged, computer-illiterate windows users....

The only reason I still have windows on my system is because most of my 
games won't work in wine, and I can't get my printer working. I'm in the 
process of *trying* to write a driver for it, but....