Did You Know...

Posted on February 05, 2007 at 12:13 PM

...since January 17th, 2004, there have been more emails sent each and every day than there are people on earth?


And we all know that a lot of that is spam, right? I'm estimating that about a quarter of all the spam I receive is in a foreign language. The majority of that is Russian and comes to me in cyrillic script. I have no idea what they're about but many of them come with images ranging from outside hot tubs to highly decorated wooden boxes. I haven't a clue as to how to filter them out. Any suggestions?

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Comments

Tami at February 5, 2007 01:13 PM

I get anywhere from 10 to 20 spam emails each day. I just keep deleting them.

Elle [TypeKey Profile Page] at February 5, 2007 03:14 PM

I wish I only got between 10 and 20 per day. I get hundreds and hundreds of the things. I have loads of filters in place so they go directly to my deleted folder but still loads of them get through to my in box, especially the ones in a foreign language as I don't know how to make filters for them :(

spamkiller at February 5, 2007 09:45 PM

Use hot words... A list of words that reoccur in the emails you get sent, add to your 'hit list'.
You should also notice a pattern to the email addresses the spam is coming from... And, you could tell your filter to block anything that isn't in English.

Tone at February 5, 2007 10:02 PM

do the Russian ones come from.ru domains? - if so can you set up a rule to filter those - sorry if this is something you have already thought of. I get loads from Japan and filter out all .jp, risking that I might sometime get an genuine e-mail from someone in Japan - Tone

Elle [TypeKey Profile Page] at February 5, 2007 10:43 PM

Spamkiller - I do use hotwords but it's tricky to do that for stuff written in a foreign script. Having said that, I've never tried putting foreign script into one of my filters. However, as it's foreign I can't tell whether a word is being repeated because..well..it's foreign and unrecognisable. Arrggh! this is getting my brain in a tiz.

Tone - good point about the domain endings. I think I'll give that one a try. Ta muchly

maritzia at February 6, 2007 03:00 PM

What e-mail application do you use? If you aren't using Thunderbird, I highly recommend switching. It's by the mozilla/firefox folks, and I've found the spam filter is much better than anything microsoft has. It's an intelligent filter, so you spend time initially marking things as junk, but over time, it figures out what type of things are junk and makes the distinctions for you.

Emma at February 7, 2007 09:59 AM

I love your quirky facts Elle! They make me smile :-)