outlook express message filters

[andytj]

Spammer is getting round my message 'body text' filters by sending the stuff
as a picture instead of text. Anyone know how to catch these?

 

[Lanwench [MVP - Exchange]]

In

Spammer is getting round my message 'body text' filters by sending
the stuff as a picture instead of text. Anyone know how to catch
these?

Use antispam software (try SpamBayes).

Note also, you're in the wrong newsgroup, unfortunately. This is a group to
support Microsoft Outlook (part of Microsoft Office). Outlook Express is a
part of Internet Explorer and is an entirely different program, despite its
similar name..

You will probably get a faster and more expert answer if you post this to an
Outlook Express news group. Try
microsoft.public.windows.inetexplorer.ie6_outlookexpress (I'm presuming
you're using OE6).

If this group isn't carried on the news server that's carrying this group,
try using news.microsoft.com as your NNTP server.

A good website for information on OE is http://www.insideoe.com/

 

[Vanguard]

Spammer is getting round my message 'body text' filters by sending the
stuff
as a picture instead of text. Anyone know how to catch these?

This group is for Outlook, not for Outlook EXPRESS. They are separate
and different products.

There is no way for a rule or filter to interrogate the contents of a
graphical image. That is, the program cannot "read" what *looks* like
text to you but is really just a picture of pixels that you happen to
interpret as text characters.

The best you could do would be to filter on mails that have .gif
attachments since that seems to be the filetype of choice by spammers.
Unfortunately, Outlook (as of version 2002; don't know about 2003) does
not have a condition that will let you test on the MIME filetypes
contained within the body of an e-mail. It would be wonderful if
Microsoft would add filetype conditions to the rules so you could test
on what type of file (attached or inline) was included in the e-mail.
Although all e-mail is sent in plain-text format (i.e., its raw format
is plain text), Outlook rules won't look inside MIME parts for encoded
file content (disposition=attached or disposition=inline). In fact, I
believe, it won't even look inside HTML tags which some spammers use to
circumvent the filters.

Best is to use some anti-spam software in addition to Outlook. SpamPal
uses DNS blacklists and has plug-ins for Bayesian and other filters. It
does have a RegEx plug-in which perhaps you could use to detect if the
GIF filetype was specified within a MIME part in an e-mail. You could
ask over in the SpamPal forums on how to define a RegEx rule for that.
Usually SpamPal identifies these spams just by their headers as known
spam sources on their blacklists and that eliminates them for you.