What rules do you find work very well (> 75%) in keeping spam out of your inbox? For a while I was doing all right with banning a handfull of characters that show up in Korean e-mails, anything that included my e-mail address in the subject line, or the word “penis.”
But now I’m 1.o.o.z.1.n.g. th3 warr on S.p.A.m. There doesn’t seem to be a way to look for letters mixed in with numbers (nobody ever sends me e-mail about U2), an excessive number of periods (yeah, I know - I’d want to be careful with that), or a lot of mis-spelled words.
Have they got me this time? Anybody got rules to send this newer, smarter crap directly to the toilet?
I’ve often found that the characters $, %, and especially ! are almost foolproof indicators of spam.
Checking legit e-mail, I don’t see anyone using periods, so that might work.
Look at From addresses. I catch a lot by filtering out “deal,” “special,” “offer” and so on in the “from” line. (I don’t know if you can filter from lines with Outlook. I use pine.) Occassionally this does filter a legit offer from Target.com or something, but it’s nto a big loss. While those specific keywords might not work for you, you might find some that do.
Is this an Outlook-specific request, or can Eudora users play too?
Eudora users can play and learn from this too, but for my purposes I really need to know about Outlook only. Which seems to restrict rules to subject lines, as far as I can figure out.
Here are my rules, converted to Excel format. I’ve color-coded the sections for easier browsing. (~500K Excel file. That’s a sufficiently large file that I may take it down soon due to space limitations on my free web space)
These filters stop all but about 0.05% of the spam I get, which still means I get a piece or two daily, and the filters work that well only because I save the ones that get past in a “FilterFodder” mailbox and when I get around to it (1-2 times per week) I add additional filters to handle them.