Puddin' Man said:
Little desktop, W2k sp4, Outlook 2000, DSL, etc.
Due to the apparent dereliction of my ISP (ATT), I need to apply a spam
filter to my Email client (O2k).
Would like to have Email containing the text string "Replica Watches"
diverted to a junk folder or "Deleted Items".
This is practical?
Thx,
Puddin'
"Take Yo' Hand Out My Pocket (I Ain't Got Nothing What Belongs To You)!"
- Rice Miller, who probably never even _heard_ of Paulson, Bernanke, etc
(2nd repost on Microsoft's NNTP server. 1st didn't show up after 12
hours. Ignore if duplicated on your NNTP server.)
And just how were you unimpressed that a blacklist rule based on strings
in the Subject couldn't get rid of messages that had those strings in
the Subject header?
Personally I don't see searching on strings in the Subject header is
going to be very effective at getting rid of spam. After all, the
spammer wants you to read their e-mail so they are unlikely to use a
Subject that cues the recipient that the e-mail is spam. Instead it'll
be something like "Hey, take a look at this" or "Important status
regarding your account". Identifying spam by its Subject header is only
marginally more useful than checking their bogus e-mail address which is
a worthless method. Detect by e-mail address is worthless. Detect by
Subject is nearly worthless. What if they ISO encode the Subject
header? Your ASCII string won't match. What if they substitute
look-alike characters, like 1 for small-case L, or 0 (zero) for O (oh),
or $ for S, or trademark symbol for R or upper-case a with umlat for an
"a"? Are you going to check for all those permutations? With regex it
wouldn't be that difficult but Microsoft doesn't embrace regular
expressions (too Unix-like for their taste).
Get some anti-spam software. Don't know your budget so don't know if
you're only interested in freebies or payware. Freebies include
SpamPal, SpamBayes, Spamhilator, and several others. Payware includes
SpamBully, Mailwasher, and several others. There is also SpamNet
(renamed to Cloudmark's Desktop) and some other voting schemes but the
problem with those is that you end up voting on spam to help others not
see it, so you have to poll at longer intervals hoping others already
got the spam and voted on it. I've used SpamPal in the past but have
gotten so few spams leaking past the email provider's filter that I
discontinued using it. It equalled or surpassed many freebie and
payware products. I've tried Spamhilator and it looks interesting but
it actually requires a lot of tweaking over time to condition it
properly to work with your e-mails to avoid LOTS of false positives.
SpamBayes and many others are just Bayesian filters and SpamPal has that
with a plug-in but incorporates several other methods of detecting spam;
however, DNSBLs (public blacklists) is its primary method of detecting
known spam sources.
