Re: I found the answer to the Comcast spam block

From: *Vanguard* (no-email_at_post-reply-in-newsgroup.invalid)
Date: 03/20/04 

Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2004 05:48:07 -0600

"Robert Aldwinckle" said in
news:OrD9%23teDEHA.3584@TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl:
>>> Are you using rules regarding size? I have never seen OE use the
>>> TOP command but I don't use rules.
> ...
>> So OE yanks the entire message; i.e., it won't just download the
>> headers.
>
> I could have elaborated on what I was thinking of here.
> Jim Pickering claims that rules can be used to delete from server
> based
> on size apparently without downloading the whole message.
> I contend that the only practical way to do that would be to use the
> TOP command. ...

There's no guarantee that additional info is returned by the
non-optional STAT command. Even if it does return information, it only
tells the total number of messages and their aggregate size in octets
(bytes), which would be useless for rules against specific messages.

The non-optional LIST command "... consists of the message-number of the
message, followed by a single space and the exact size of the message in
octets" (RFC 1939). So you can get the size just by using LIST.

The optional TOP command downloads the number of specified lines from
the body of the message but it always includes all of the headers (and
why my e-mail monitor would do "TOP <msgnum> 0" to get just the
headers). This command reports nothing regarding the size of the
message. So, yeah, you could use TOP (with a really big line-count
number) to probably download all of a message and then check its size
locally but it would be far easier to just use the LIST command with is
a required command.

Magic is an e-mail monitor program that also provides for rules (or
filters). You can configure it to download some of every message but
that takes time and I don't really use the monitor to read my e-mails.
I tried PopTray but its header rule is too flaky as to when it might
fire. I use Magic to use its rules to delete spam off the server so
Magic only needs the headers. I run Magic and Outlook through SpamPal
which uses blacklists and can tag spam based solely on their headers, so
that's all Magic has to download (so it can see the SpamPal tag so its
rule can delete that message off my mail server).

Thanks for the heads up on netcap. How is this sniffer different than
another, like Ethereal? (I haven't tried Ethereal yet but hear it's a
good freebie.)

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