Using Spambouncer on Cygwin
I’ve recently started using Spambouncer to filter the increasing amount of junk I get emailed to me. Trouble is, most of the time I’m forced to use Windows (work build environment etc).
My solution has been to use Cygwin, the UNIX environment for Windows. There are Cygwin packages of Mutt, Procmail, and Fetchmail. The only problem is I couldn’t find any documentation about running Spambouncer under Cygwin.
Spambouncer is a set of Procmail rules which filter mail for you (and optionally send complaints emails about spam to abuse@ email addresses). There are problems under Cygwin though, because Spambouncer uses the nslookup utility to query domains. Cygwin doesn’t supply a version of nslookup though, and Spambouncer doesn’t work properly with the version supplied with Windows.
Luckily there are specially-compiled versions of nslookup (and other utilities such as “host” and “dig”) available at the BIND for Cygwin page. You’ll then have to make sure that your Spambouncer setup (in sb.rc) points at the correct version of nslookup (not the Windows one which is probably already in your path). I found the line:
{ NSLOOKUP="/opt/bind/bin/nslookup" }
did the job for me.
Hopefully that will help someone else stem the flow of junk…