[Mimedefang] Filtering usernames

Kenneth Porter shiva at sewingwitch.com
Fri Dec 15 07:43:46 EST 2006


I've got a wildcard entry in my virtusertable to deal with the braindead 
websites that can't handle plussed addresses. I want to be able to put 
"shiva+yourwebsitehere" as my username but most reject that. So I've got a 
mismash of adhoc usernames that either use a dot instead of a plus, or omit 
my username and just use the sitename. (Sometimes the braindeath is a 
too-short email field.)

The result is that I also get a lot of spam directed to random addresses. 
SpamAssassin deals with most of it, but I'd still like to be able to SMTP 
reject more of it that's directed at nonsensical usernames.

So I'm asking for advice on how to escape my initial predicament (I guess I 
need to log all usernames arriving in my account for awhile and see if I 
can capture all the legitimate ones) and meantime what I can do to reject 
as much of the chaff as I can.

One rule that comes to mind is to reject all usernames with no vowels in 
them. The names I choose always have vowels. Does anyone see any obvious 
problems with that? I can't do that with a sendmail table, but it's easy to 
do with MD.



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