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Use a Mail.app rule to stop Far East spam Apps
In the last few months, I've been receiving a heap of spam from China. Luckily, I've found a way to identify mail in Mail.app with that character set so that it can be marked as junk. To do this:
  1. Select Mail -> Preferences -> Rules
  2. Select Junk -> Edit
  3. Select (+) to add a new rule.
  4. Click on the "From" drop-down and select "Edit Header List..."
  5. Add "Content-Class" by typing "Content-Class" in the "Header:" text box and then hit "Add Header" and "OK."
  6. Set the first pop-up on your new rule to Content-Class, the second to Contains, and the third to charset="gb2312".
  7. Select (+) to add a new rule.
  8. Set the pop-ups to Subject, Contains, and charset="gb2312".
  9. Select (+) to add a new rule.
  10. Set the pop-ups to From, Contains, and charset="gb2312".
  11. Click the "OK" button to end the rule definition.
I'm happy to say that this gets 100% of the Far East spam that I was receiving!
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Use a Mail.app rule to stop Far East spam | 10 comments | Create New Account
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Use a Mail.app rule to stop Far East spam
Authored by: Dieringer on Apr 24, '03 11:04:35AM

Are all of these conditions required?



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Use a Mail.app rule to stop Far East spam
Authored by: johnseal on Apr 27, '03 02:25:37PM

The default Junk rule, at least for me, had two conditions:
Sender is not in my Address Book, and Message is junk mail,
with the rule set to trigger if "all" conditions are met. Adding
these new conditions to catch Chinese mail means the rule no
longer catches what used to be considered junk mail.

Changing the trigger to "any" condition met would mark too
much stuff as junk mail, e.g., mail from anybody not in my
Address Book. What is the right way to add these rules?

---
Do quantum pirates make you walk the Planck?



[ Reply to This | # ]
What about russian spam
Authored by: SOX on Apr 24, '03 02:30:51PM

I get russian (cyrillic) spam. what's the analogous rule?



[ Reply to This | # ]
russian spam
Authored by: SOX on Apr 24, '03 04:19:03PM

the filter for russian spam is
Content-type
contains
charset=windows-1251



[ Reply to This | # ]
Other Far East spam?
Authored by: kennyfett on Apr 25, '03 10:04:10AM

What about Korean spam?



---
"If you kill him, he won't learn nothin'" -Jim Carrey as the Riddler



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Use a Mail.app rule to stop Far East spam
Authored by: Typhoon14 on Apr 24, '03 09:19:55PM

Remember, this will be equally effective at blocking all mail
from these regions, not just spam.



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Use a Mail.app rule to stop Far East spam
Authored by: wenzi on Apr 24, '03 09:47:25PM

Should say that this does not block ALL mail from these regions,
but those that are associated with mainland china. For example,
Taiwan, country near China, would not be affected.



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Use a Mail.app rule to stop Far East spam
Authored by: bdm on Apr 25, '03 12:41:34AM

Note that these character sets include roman characters as a subset, and many Chinese people routinely use them even when sending mail in English. It is convenient for them as they can use English, Chinese or a mixture. It isn't even just people in those countries who use these character sets either; I get mail from Chinese friends in USA and Europe who use it too. Don't block mail based on Chinese character set unless you don't want any mail at all from Chinese people. Same for cyrillic etc.

The "right" way is to measure the fraction of the email body which is in non-roman characters. I don't know if it is possible in Mail.



[ Reply to This | # ]
pray for unicode if you choose this method
Authored by: mdxi on Apr 25, '03 10:03:08AM

> this will be equally effective at blocking all mail
> from these regions, not just spam

Quite correct.

Further, this will likely only match mail originating from mainland China (and there's 4 other, less popular encoding types just for Simplified Chinese). Mail from Taiwan will likely be in one of the Big5 encodings, Korea (where *I* see spam from) is probably EUC-KR or ISO-2022-KR, and Japan uses either SHIFT-JIS, ISO-2022-JP, EUC-JP (probably).



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Use a Mail.app rule to stop Far East spam
Authored by: _merlin on Apr 25, '03 11:43:15PM

Rob, don?t print this stuff! There is a world outside the English-speaking community! Blocking e-mail based on its encoding creates a lot of trouble. There are so many hints on this web site about disableing ?useless? non-English material, and disabling language-related UI elements, it?s disturbing.

As pointed out in other comments, this rule will mark any mail with encoded in GB as being junk. It won?t only block mail from mainland China. GB is very popular in Singapore and Hong Kong, and used by a lot of Chinese- speaking people for English messages, because it can represent Roman characters, too. The same goes for Cyrillic, Japanese and Korean encodings.

An example of where this may make trouble is when you send a technical support question to the supplier of some piece of hardware (Pioneer SuperDrive from Japan, MCT USB hub or serial adapter from Taiwan, Epson printer from Japan, etc), and get an English reply encoded in GB, or ISO2022. The filter will delete it.

In fact a number of hints have been published about using OS X?s Character palette to input unusual characters. Mail.app uses a smart algorithm to choose an encoding for a message. If you input some weird character (a circled number, for example), Mail.app will be very likely to encode the message using ISO2022, as it supports a wide variety of special characters and symbols. When you send it, you may be sending a message that will be zapped by a filter like the ones advocated in this hint!



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