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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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