Email Blocking

[Patricio Elicer]

I'm getting a load of spam emails everyday from an "info@" address. The content is just squiggles. The text after the @ symbol is permanently changing, so the Outlook Express' "Block Message" option doesn't work.

Is there a way to block them all at once?

This is how my inbox looks like (I've obscured my private email address):

Thanks.

 

[BillC]

Can you do it by setting a rule to block e-mails with characters in a certain ASCII range?

 

[davidhorman]

Obligatory stop-using-Outlook-Express-and-start-using-Mozilla-Thunderbird reply.

Carry on.

David

 

[Patricio Elicer]

Can you do it by setting a rule to block e-mails with characters in a certain ASCII range?

Under the "Message" menu there's a "Create Rule for This Message" option. It gives me the option to move or delete any message with a word of my choice on the "From" line. I put in the word "info", and move the messages to the Deleted Messages Folder. I don't know if it'll work because "info" is part of a longer string of characters. We'll see.

Thanks for the tip.

 

[JLam]

The only problem here is that you risk losing any legitimate email that comes to you with the word "info" in it.

My suggestion is to get yourself a gmail account. It has great spam blocking.

PM me if you need a gmail invite.

(And count me in the "quit using Outlook" chorus, too.)

 

[Beady]

The only problem here is that you risk losing any legitimate email that comes to you with the word "info" in it.

I've been online for ~15 years and, for the life of me, I don't recall getting a single legitimate email with the word "info" in the headers.

However, it may be possible to block info@* , where * is a wildcard.

 

[Patricio Elicer]

The only problem here is that you risk losing any legitimate email that comes to you with the word "info" in it.

Yes, I thought about that, but I chose the "Move to a Folder" option, so I won't lose anything. Those messages will be moved to another folder automatically, that's what the rule is supposed to do.

Oddly, since I set the rule, I have got no more emails of that sort, not even in the target folder (and I was getting at least 5 per day). I'll wait for a couple of days and if there's no sign of the emails, I will desactivate the rule to see what happens.

My suggestion is to get yourself a gmail account. It has great spam blocking.

PM me if you need a gmail invite.

Thanks for the offer, but I'm not willing to go through the trouble of having to notify dozens of contacts of a new email address. I've been using this one for years, on work, friends, commerce, etc.

 

[davidhorman]

Thanks for the offer, but I'm not willing to go through the trouble of having to notify dozens of contacts of a new email address.

Would you consider changing client? Thunderbird would class all of those as spam after you'd marked the first one. And while they might be only the problem emails at the moment (in which case you've been very smart or very lucky), spam is like entropy - it always increases with time

There are probably free spammy things if you want to stick with OE.

David

 

[Soapy Sam]

You might go at it from the other end:- Only permit email from a known address list. That's what I do, but my employers keep complaining they can't reach me, as instead of using Jobtitle@Company.net, they insist on using Firstname.Lastname@company.net, which is OK till someone new arrives. There's a downside to any system.

 

[Beady]

You might go at it from the other end:- Only permit email from a known address list. That's what I do, but my employers keep complaining they can't reach me, as instead of using Jobtitle@Company.net, they insist on using Firstname.Lastname@company.net, which is OK till someone new arrives. There's a downside to any system.

So, accept email from "*@company.net"

 

[Soapy Sam]

Tried that. It didn't work.

Could be I mistyped though. I'll try it again.

 

[hankalme]

In addition to folling with blacklists/whitelists (which will tend to not work too well), there are several types of spam filtering software available. I use a program called spamassasin on my linux box, which combines several types of filters, and gets much of the spam that comes my way, with a -- thus far -- 0% false positive rate.

One filter that seems popular right now, and with which I have had some success, is a so-called "Bayesian filter". It is basically a classifier that learns to sort spam from "ham" (good email) based on the user providing some initial guidance. You would mark messages as spam or ham, and the filter cottons on quite quickly. It is not perftect, but brings things down to a managable level.

There is an open source project I know of called SpamBayes, which is a nice implementation. I used it for quite a while on my old Mac and on my old Linux machine. They have a plugin version for Outlook. Initial installation is not too bad, and the docs were quite sufficient for me (a tinkerer, but no expert)

Check out spambayes.sourceforge.net

Cheers,

Hank