hi there~

i hope some kind soul will be able to help me.  i have been posting on
usenet for many years now and it is only recently that the spam that
results from it has gotten pretty bad.  i would like to know how to
'munge' the from: line on my postings from trn.  i have read the man
pages for trn and there is some information that i think might pertain
to this puzzle, but i do not know how to use the information:

   Interpretation and Interpolation

   Many  of  the  strings  that  trn  handles  are  subject  to
   interpretations of several types.  Under filename expansion,
   an initial "~/" is translated  to  the  name  of  your  home
   directory,  and "~name" is translated to the login directory
   for the user specified.  Filename expansion will also expand
   an   initial   environment   variable,  and  also  does  the
   backslash, caret and percent expansion mentioned below.

   All interpreted strings go through backslash, caret and per-
   cent  interpretation.   The backslash escapes are the normal
   ones (such as \n, \t, \033, etc.).  The caret escapes  indi-
   cate  control  codes (such as ^i, ^l, etc.).  If you wish to
   pass through a backslash or a caret it must be escaped  with
   a  backslash.   The  special  percent escapes are similar to
   printf percent escapes.  These  cause  the  substitution  of
   various  run-time values into the string.  The following are
   currently recognized:

   [deleted...]

   %D      "Distribution:" line from the current article.
 
   %f      "From:"  line  from  the  current  article,  or  the
   "Reply-To:"   line  if  there  is one.  This differs
   from %t in that comments (such as the full name) are
   not stripped out with %f.

   [deleted]

end of man page excerpt...

how do i use this information to achieve my desire?  or am i looking
in the wrong direction?

from usenet search using key words ["how to" munge from trn]:

"Yes, you can do it. Just add the From: line in the NEWSHEADER
setting."

what is the NEWSHEADER setting?  is this an environmental value?  when
i type setenv, i see many values, none of which are NEWSHEADER.  from
the prompt would i type something like:

setenv NEWSHEADER From: mymungedemail@REMOVEME.myschool.edu
	
	?  

also from my usenet search:

"Gravity complies, though with all the silly people who now munge
their addresses in the naive belief it'll cut down on spam, one has to
usually
hand-edit email reply addresses anyway."

[gravity is a newsreader that the poster of the quote believes in]

is it really naive to think that munging will help cut down on spam?

anyways, all thoughtful replies, comments and answers gratefully
accepted.  if i dont get an answer that works, i will dutifully
continue slogging through the spam, no problem.

please ask if you need any clarifications!

hahna

I suspect munging would cut down on spam had it been done from the
beginning; however, now that your email address is readily available
in usenet archives and in spammer's databases, munging now, although
it may cut down on some spam trolling bots who look at recent postings
or who give credence to them specifically, may not reduce by too much
the problem.

Using an antispam facility may be your only hope. I use Yahoo Mail,
whose "bulk mail" features catches a lot of spam, but it still lets
through a few every day; this solution is not directly applicable to
an existing non-yahoo email address, but, depending on your
configuration, I know there is anti-spam software out there. (Some
work at the client level and some at the mail-server level)

I agree with rbnn-ga.  An email address I have given *nobody* in 2
years still receives one or two spams a day, after being heavily
filtered by a university.  An unfiltered account I use for the purpose
of collecting spam in an account I don't use much gets perhaps a dozen
a day.

Spammers typically do not remove addresses from their database, even
if the mail server responds that the user no longer exists - I've read
numberous anecdotes to this effect.  In short, even if your email
address could disappear completely from usenet, at best you will
reduce your future spam potential, but you won't reduce the number of
spams you get now.

Depending on your technical skill level, you can use something like
Yahoo's automated tools, or a number of GPL'd spam-blocking utilities.
 I saw an article recently about a little utility to use Bayesian
networks to detect spam - you feed it your spam and your real mail and
it will construct a network just for you.  The author's tests
indicated a 99.something% effectiveness in blocking spam and a 0%
false-positive (accidently throws your mail out) rate.

trn rocks!

I haven't fully investigated this, but I think that while there are
ways to change the From line, your actual address may still be in the
Originator line in the header.  And to change that info, you would
need to alter the source code for trn itself (which you probably don't
have access to).