On Fri, 11 Aug 2006 00:05:22 -0400, Ted Zieglar wrote:

OE has only rudimentary spam blocking capabilities. Your friend will be
much happier with a third-party spam blocker. He also has to take basic
steps to avoid receiving spam in the first place, such as being careful
who gets his email address, staying off mailing lists and not
participating in group e-mails. In addition, his ISP may have spam
blocking capabilities.

There are also mail clients with more complete rules. I gave up MS
Outlook Express for Pegasus Mail, largely because PM is able to test
regular expressions ("wild cards" to those familiar the term; more
precisely, "wild cards on steroids"). I have one rule which looks like
this:

| If header "T" contains "Proper Name" SkipNext ""
| If header "CT" contains " Move "GXID7DQP:7A96:FOL07A96"

This test for the presence of my "Proper Name" in the "To:" field. If
present, skip the next rule, otherwise, test for the presence of
" in the "Cc:", or the "To:" field. If present,
move the email to a folder. The actual filename is "FOL07A96.PMM" on the
HDD, but "Block Spam" within the application.

An example of a rule with a regular expression test is:

| If expression headers matches "Received: from*[([]221.1[45][0-9].[0-9]+.[0-9]+*)*" Goto "Korea"
| If expression headers matches "Received: from*[([]221.16[0-8].[0-9]+.[0-9]+*)*" Goto "Korea"

I have no contacts in Korea, so any email from a Korean ISP _is_ spam.
These two rules test for the host IP address. Any IP address from
"221.140.0.0" to "221.168.255.255" is trapped, and sent to the "Korea"
section of the rules. The "Korea" section is just a "Delete" rule. All
email from any IP address in that range is automatically deleted.

The regular expression included meta characters, such as the familir
"*", which is part of "wildcards", as well the "+" and the paired "[]".
In the first line, the ".1[45][0-9]." would match whether there was a
".140.", ".141.", and so on, up to ".159".

MSOE can't even come close to that; and I haven't even explored the
Content Checker, another excellent filter in Pegasus Mail.

--
Norman
~Oh Lord, why have you come
~To Konnyu, with the Lion and the Drum