tvaughan
Registered
I have come to this forum because I'm not getting squat at Apple's discussion forums (q.v. this thread). I am trying to get some answers about Mail's Rules capabilties, or those of third-party products.
Most of the spam that I get follows one of five simple patterns:
1. It contains one or more empty fields (to, from, subject, or message body),
2. It sometimes lacks a "from" or "subject" field entirely.
3. Mail recipients are sequential (e.g. tetsujin@mac.com, tetsuya@mac.com, tevas@mac.com).
4. Total message size is 0.7 KB or less. (Due to empty fields.)
5. It contains a gif or jpeg touting whatever product the spammer is flogging.
It seems like it would be trivial to incorporate filter rules to take care of empty or non-existent fields (categories 1 and 2). But I can't see a way to do that in Mail currently. Hopefully Apple is working on this? Or maybe there's a third-party add-on that can address this?
Also it would be easy to take care of #3 with the use of simple grep expressions. But I don't think Mail can do this yet. (Again, any third-party solutions out there?)
For #4, obviously a rule that could take into account message size would help deal with those emails.
And for #5, it's more problematic, but since there are programs out there that can read graphics, hence the need for captcha "encryption" on web sites, why not use such an app as a Mail extension? It would be great if it could interoperate with Mail's rules, so you could set up something like "if message contains a jpeg or gif and if the image contains 'penile enlargement' then delete/put in junk folder."
Currently I put all messages with attachments (that haven't already been approved by my whitelist) in a "limbo" folder for later review. But I have to use a minor kluge to do this. Ideally I'd just say "if message has an attachment" or "if message attachment is not empty," but those options aren't available so I have to say "if name of attachment contains '.'" Since pretty much all files have a "." in them, it seems to work fine, but strictly speaking it's not as elegant as I'd like it to be.
Does anyone know of any ways to implement these kinds of filters in Mail or using third-party software? Or another client (e.g. T-bird)?
Most of the spam that I get follows one of five simple patterns:
1. It contains one or more empty fields (to, from, subject, or message body),
2. It sometimes lacks a "from" or "subject" field entirely.
3. Mail recipients are sequential (e.g. tetsujin@mac.com, tetsuya@mac.com, tevas@mac.com).
4. Total message size is 0.7 KB or less. (Due to empty fields.)
5. It contains a gif or jpeg touting whatever product the spammer is flogging.
It seems like it would be trivial to incorporate filter rules to take care of empty or non-existent fields (categories 1 and 2). But I can't see a way to do that in Mail currently. Hopefully Apple is working on this? Or maybe there's a third-party add-on that can address this?
Also it would be easy to take care of #3 with the use of simple grep expressions. But I don't think Mail can do this yet. (Again, any third-party solutions out there?)
For #4, obviously a rule that could take into account message size would help deal with those emails.
And for #5, it's more problematic, but since there are programs out there that can read graphics, hence the need for captcha "encryption" on web sites, why not use such an app as a Mail extension? It would be great if it could interoperate with Mail's rules, so you could set up something like "if message contains a jpeg or gif and if the image contains 'penile enlargement' then delete/put in junk folder."
Currently I put all messages with attachments (that haven't already been approved by my whitelist) in a "limbo" folder for later review. But I have to use a minor kluge to do this. Ideally I'd just say "if message has an attachment" or "if message attachment is not empty," but those options aren't available so I have to say "if name of attachment contains '.'" Since pretty much all files have a "." in them, it seems to work fine, but strictly speaking it's not as elegant as I'd like it to be.
Does anyone know of any ways to implement these kinds of filters in Mail or using third-party software? Or another client (e.g. T-bird)?
