SPAM Filtering
As many others here I too am experiencing an explosion in SPAM lately. They mostly follow a particular pattern in the subject beginning with 2 or 3 numbers followed by a dash and then followed by some nonsense phrase. I understand a new Anti-SPAM system will be initiated shortly by Cox. Hopefully it will resolve this mess. In the meantime, I am looking at setting up manual filters to try to alleviate this flood of SPAM. I noticed the new filters have some interesting options which seem to work well although trying to keep up with the mutations of these SPAM mails can be difficult.
I see there is an option to use Regular Expressions as a tool to search for key words or phrases in the emails. I have some questions.
1. Are you using Regular Expressions as defined in the Perl syntax?
2. There is an option to search in "Headers". Does this include the entire raw header section of the emails?
3. When looking at the raw source format of these emails, the "Subject" title in many of them are coded as UTF-8 instead of regular text format which makes it virtually impossible to decipher. I suspect these emails are coming from overseas. What would be visible to the filter mechanism in the "Subject" title, the converted text or the raw UTF-8 coding? That would determine what type of filter that could be set up to block them. If it is the raw UTF-8 coding, then a filter looking for the "UTF-8" could possibly eliminate these emails.
4. Does the "Discard" action completely eliminate the email from appearing anywhere in your email list?
Unfortunately not a lot of people are familiar with the use of regular expressions, but thanks for including that option.
JohnD
