[rt-users] Strategies for coping with spam

[Phil Homewood]

Tony Aiuto wrote:
> Does anyone have any thoughts to share about coping with spam in the
> context of a customer support?   We chose not to use a filter like
> spamassassin on our support email because we don't want to risk ignoring
> customer mail.  What we end up seeing is at least 5 or 10 spams a day
> which create tickets.

Spamassassin doesn't have to be used to delete mail. We use it
to shuffle the suspected spam into a "spam" queue. That queue
has a different autoack which the user must reply to for the
ticket to jump from the spam queue to the intended queue.
The hackery to do this has been posted to this list before;
a search should find it. If enough people think it's useful,
I'll add it to RT/FM, too.

> Most of these emails have invalid sender addresses.  RT generates
> the autoresponse, and it bounces.   One thing for certain, you should
> never make the outgoing mail envelope address be a live queue address!

Er. No. That way lies pain. :^)

> So now, support-admin (me) gets a bunch of mails like this every day.

<snipbounce>

> These have to be hand checked and deleted.  Does anyone else have a
> similar problem? 

Yes. but not enough to have annoyed me yet.

> Have they whacked rt-mailgate to look for bounces
> like this and kill the corresponding ticket? 
I think the The criteria

It's been mentioned here before but I don't know if anyone's
actually done it.

I'd actually recommend against hacking rt-mailgate for this.
If you don't identify a bounce as such (${DEITY} knows, there
are enough weirdo MTAs with oddball bounce boilerplate out there)
you'll end up in evil loopville once again.

Instead...

> 	Mail is from MAILER-DAEMON
> 	Body contains
> 	   ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
> 	Body contains
> 	   Subject: [<valid RT ticket ident>] Support case acknowledged: ......

could be checked from a procmail (or similar) recipe running
as the support-admin user, and the ticket gets killed using
rt's command line tools. The fun part would be pulling the
ticket number out of the bounce mess and communicating it to
/path/to/rt/bin/rt.

Also, watch out for real users whose mail bounces due to
transient problems.

: From: luser at example.com
: To: helpdesk at example.com
: Subject: Help, my mailbox is full
: 
: My mailbox is full. Mail to me is bouncing.
: Can you please clean it out? Thanks.
-- 
Phil Homewood, Systems Janitor, www.SnapGear.com
pdh at snapgear.com Ph: +61 7 3435 2810 Fx: +61 7 3891 3630
SnapGear - Custom Embedded Solutions and Security Appliances