Mail's junk filter targetted by spammers?

Mr Tea

Mr Tea

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I've started getting spam that seems to have blank subject, sender and recipient fields. My copy of Mail does not recognise these as junk, and marking them as junk usually causes Mail to crash, both in training and automatic modes. When this happens, it sometimes also wrecks Mail's ability to spot any kind of junk, and no amount of re-training will fix it. The only option is to trash the LMM2 file in ~/Library/Mail/ and start over.

Could it be that someone out there has deliberately created a lump of spam that corrupts Mail's junk filtering data? Perhaps I'm just being paranoid, but I'd be interested to know if anyone else here has seen this kind of thing.
 
i havent had this problem, but of course i dont get spam mail either. i have two email accounts, one gets maybe 10 spam emails a week, and the other gets none.. ever

im always confused by everyones problems with spam :confused:
 
Lucky you. I get over 100 spams a day. The problem is my simple email addresses - with just three letters before the @ (eg, abc@isp.com), I'm a sitting duck for the spammers' automatic address generators. If I changed these to something more complex, like suppurating.genitalwart@isp.com, I'm sure my spam woes would quickly evaporate. But dammitall! I don't want to bow down to the spammers by being forced to change my minimalist, easy-to-type, easy-to-remember email addresses, which is why I value Mail's excellent filtering abilities so much. When it's working right, the amount of spam I see and have to deal with is reduced from a raging torrent to the merest trickle.
 
put all the mail coming that does not include your email address in the to field to a separate folder, or directly to trash.
 
1) your email address is not in to: field
2) nothing in the from: field
> trash

that should work
 
Well it doesn't fix the problem. The problem is the spammer is somehow sending a message with absolutely nothing (not even a space) in the subject field. So, any rule I try to make to try to stop these messages seems to fail because the messages still get through. For the life of me I can't figure out how to make a rule to dump these kind of messages straight to trash.

Giaguara: I can't make your rule work for two reasons. Mail.app will not let me make a rule the rejects nothing in the subject field. Second, on my work mailing list My email doesn't directly show in the from field (I believe is a part on Windows Outlook group feature). So, With your rule my messages from it are getting dumped into trash. So, I had to kill that rule.

The problem is in Mail.app. The rules will not let me make a rule to stop messages without a subject field. Well, I have to admit I have yet figured out a way.
 
1) your email addy not in subject field >
2) sender is not what you specify > trash

group emails do have sender normally, don't they?
 
FWIW, all my spam problems have been solved by SpamSieve (a shareware spam-catcher that works with most OS X email clients). It even catches those pesky blank messages that were giving me trouble in Mail. In fact, I've ditched Mail in favour of Entourage vX - which I had previously ditched in favour of Mail because its spam filter was useless. SpamSieve works effectively and seamlessly with Entourage, and is a whole lot cheaper than upgrading to Office 2004 (pah, out of date already).

BTW - seems appropriate that while Apple is naming new OS versions after sleek and independent feline hunters, MicroSoft plans to name its much-delayed 'next generation' OS after a type of cattle.

Self-knowledge is a wonderful thing.
 
Mr Tea said:
Could it be that someone out there has deliberately created a lump of spam that corrupts Mail's junk filtering data?
Click to expand...
I get those as well and I have been puzzling over what their purpose could be. My speculations have included
  • some sort of denial of service attack
  • content stripped out by the ISP's virus filters but the message sent anyway
  • spammers testing new techniques
  • spammers testing email addresses for validity (if they don't get a bounce back it is a valid email address)
  • spammers trying to "jam" spam filters (I had not thought of this one until you mentioned it)
But none of those seem to hold water so I haven't really figured it out yet. If it is some sort of attempt to corrupt spam filters, I can promise you that its target is spam filters in general not just Mail's spam filters.

I have several different email accounts, but 98% of all the spam I receive is through the account with the ISP and 100% of the blank messages. I do have their spam filter turned on as well as the Mail spam filter and Mail's spam filter catches at least 98% of what slips past the ISPs spam filter. That still means a few manage to slip through every week. How much Viagra can one man take anyway? :D
 
All blank e-mails that I get are marked correctly as SPAM and sent to my junk folder. They all come through my yahoo account though.
 
arkayn said:
All blank e-mails that I get are marked correctly as SPAM and sent to my junk folder. They all come through my yahoo account though.
Click to expand...
Is Yahoo flagging them as spam before they get to you? Some email providers do flag suspected spam at their end. If not how have you gotten Mail to recognize them as spam?
 
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