View Full Version : Enuff Already !!!! - HELP!
TwoDogs
9th Apr 2002, 11:51
Living in this wonderful part of the world where piracy and spamming are the norm I have been receiving on a daily basis dozens of e-mails addressed to me in which I have absolutely no interest. I have managed to filter out some using the software in Netscape Messenger however there are a large number that I am unable to filter. These are the ones that are written (I presume) in chinese, either Big5 or Chinese simplified. They appear to me as garbled text and symbols, not Chinese characters and I really am sick of having to delete dozens each day.
Does anybody know if it is possible to filter these out in some way.
I do not want to change my e-mail address as that would be extremely inconvenient. :confused:
Two Dogs, you are not alone with that issue, even my Business Mail address receives these messages all day long, and it is very painful as Outlook keeps installing all the unknown fonts as well as we decided to use this setting to enable correct display of special drawings or patterns we need in our daily work here....
christep
9th Apr 2002, 12:07
Get a decent email program such as Eudora (http://www.eudora.com) or Turnpike (http://www.turnpike.com) and you will be able to do filtering at whatever level you want either on the headers (if possible to save download time) or even on the content.
Eudora now has a free version if you can accept ads on the screen.
TwoDogs
9th Apr 2002, 12:14
WOW !!! So quick guys. I only posted 3 minutes ago.
So will Eudora recognise the non-chinese garbage??
christep
9th Apr 2002, 12:28
As far as I can tell from Eudora's website it should be possible - you can filter on the content of any headers, so you just need to look at the emails you are getting and see what the header lines are that are common to the mails you want to reject (for example they might all contan the characters "BIG5"). You can basically write any regular expression (logic statement) to filter messages and decide what to do with them.
I use Turnpike myself, which is quite similar.
The ads in the free Eudora might be a bit of a pain though.
TwoDogs
9th Apr 2002, 12:39
Unfortunately the characters that appear in both the subject and the sender are not part of any normal character set (including Big5 or chinese) it is just a bunch of nonsensical garbled characters.
Yes Two Dogs, that is exactly the problem, and we cannot change here because we have a complete Office-setup and need to run Outlook as integral part of our system.
We are also trying to find a solution since some time, we have tried to route through spam filters etc.... all to no avail yet
TwoDogs
9th Apr 2002, 15:33
FL310
Have done some investigating and found that there are some recurring characters that appear in the subject of most of the emails. The characters are ¼ and ± and À
I have created filters using these characters - I cut and pasted them from the subject line of the original messages - but wont know if they work until the flood starts again tomorrow. Will keep you advised.
TwoDogs
10th Apr 2002, 04:17
EUREKA !!!
It Works !! It Works !!
Hopefully an end to 59% of my spam
http://www.stopstart.fsnet.co.uk/mica/pc-crash.gif
http://www.stopstart.btinternet.co.uk/sm/hdst.gif
christep
10th Apr 2002, 04:31
You shouldn't just look at the subject and sender headers... look at the others too. It may be that you can filter on the X-MIME-type or something.
If the from address is really just random characters then you could filter on "all from addresses not containing exactly one @ and at least two . " or something like that. (This is trivial to do in Eudora or Turnpike - not sure if Outlook is up to it).