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I am receiving at least 10 emails per hour with the subject - "Looking for
meds?" (plus two or three letters that vary). Can I block these?
Create a rule in Outlook that looks for that string in the Subject
header, and have it perform whatever action on that e-mail that you
want. In short: use rules.
Outlook downloads an e-mail before it can exercise any rules on it. If
you do not want to even waste the time to download the spam and then
delete it with a local rule, use a server-side rule to delete that spam.
Use the webmail interface to your e-mail account and define a rule up on
the server to delete those messages. That assumes that the UNIDENTIFIED
e-mail provider has sufficiently potent rules that let you filter out
this spam or even lets you define server-side rules. Also, when using
the webmail interface to your e-mail account, make sure the server-side
spam filtering option is enabled.
If the server-side spam filtering is too leaky, you can always
incorporate a client-side anti-spam filtering option. SpamPal is free
and can use blacklists (recommend using SpamHaus SBL+XBL [and NOT their
zen blacklist] and SpamCop and none of the others), Bayesian filtering,
and other techniques to detect spam. Bayesian is a guessing scheme so
I'd suggest moving suspect e-mails tagged by Bayes to the Junk folder
(and use auto-archiving on the Junk folder to delete e-mails older than
a few days). A User Logfile plug-in lets you record spam-tagged e-mails
so if you delete one, like those that are blacklisted, you can still
retrieve a plain-text copy from the logs (but it doesn't clear out old
logs so I used a scheduled task to run a special batch file to delete
logs older than the specified number of days). If the server-side spam
filtering is too weak, you'll need to add a client-side spam filter.