[sylpheed:30452] Re: Filter all messages from China

[Gil Andre]

Hello again,

On Tue, 21 Nov 2006 23:21:00 -0800 John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> wrote:
> > Search message subject and body for either "$B" or "$G".
> > If a message is found, move it to the Trash immediately.
> > You can also try to filter all domains ("From") that
> > end with ".cn".
> 
> I tried the first suggestion above, but it does not work. Ready to try
> to filter the "from" for all domains that end with ".cn." But how do I
> do that? Do the boxes take wildcards? Like, could I create a rule for
> the "from" field and enter in the box "*.cn"? The documention is
> totally silent on syntax for rules. 

Yes, you can use regular expressions in filter rules, as far
as I know. I guess a filter expression like the following would
work:

If From contains \.cn$ then send to trash.

Also helpful: anything that comes from the TLDs ".sg" and ".kr"
to filter anything that comes from Singapore and Korea respectively.
Filters like the following should work as well:

If From contains \.sg$ then send to trash.
If From contains \.kr$ then send to trash.

If $B and $G do not work, examine a spam message that looks like
it is written in Chinese, and make sure you write a couple of 
character pairs that come back all the time, and use that 
combination of characters in your filter rule. For instance, 
if you notice the character series "#&#X#E" comes back again
and again in your spam, just write a filter to send all messages
that contain this sequence to trash. Of course, I am totally
making this up, so make sure you pick a combination that comes
back in *your* spam.

The reason this works is that (a) like all other languages,
Chinese is susceptible to statistical analysis (meaning:
some letters or glyphs are used more often than others) 
and (b) that these characters won't be displayed in a
westernized version of Sylpheed, allowing us to filter
them more easily...

Finally, filtering by the "From" field and the domain name
is also very efficient. I have noticed that my spam decreased
substantially after filtering out the domain "interbusiness.it",
which is obviously used only by spammers. One rule decreased
the amount of spam by at least 5%.

One important [last] thing: make sure that you filter first
the "ham" (good emails) and then filter away the spam. After
a while, I noticed that using these simple rules meant all
the messages that were not filtered in my Inbox were spam.
And could be sent directly to trash. But this is only possible
for me since I don't communicate my email address to a lot of
people... 

Hope this helps!

-- 
  __  Gil ANDRE				  gil [at] panix   [dot] com
 (oO) 				andre [dot] g [at] wanadoo [dot] fr
 /||\ Relax to the soothing madness of the ancient ones: 66.6FM KTLU