Getting Rid of Foreign Language Spam
Do you get a bunch of junk mail in your email application that’s coming to you in a language that you don’t even understand? Are you an Apple Mail User? If those are both true please read the rest of this article. I will describe in detail how to get rid of this problem as much as humanly possible. If you are a PC user and use Outlook or a MAC user using Entourage, you may find the information useful as well, but the how-to won’t be quite as accurate for you.
Basically what we are doing is telling Apple mail to move messages that have a certain content-type into our junk or trash folders. Please understand before you get started that languages have many dialects and sometimes the same language can have multiple content-types so you really have to keep adding new additions to the rule as you go if you want this to work the best for you.
The first step is to find a foregin language spam that has managed to land itself in your inbox. Select that message and press “shift Apple H” or go to “View -> Message -> Long Headers”.
View Long Headers
When viewing the message in the long-header mode you’ll want to look for the header called Content-Type as shown in this picture below. This is the key to this entire article as it tells Apple Mail how to filter these messages out of your Inbox.
Content-Type
Next you’ll go to “Mail -> Preferences” and head to the “Rules” tab in Apple Mail. You’ll want to click “Add Rule” to create your rule to get rid of this spam message.
Add a Rule
This brings up a screen that has the rule set for this new rule. Do the following…
- Description – Create something to identify this rule
- If “any” of the following conditions are met…
- Click where it says “From” and do “Edit Server List” and add “Content-Type”.
- In the last field there that has this whole long string, you want to keep only this part charset=”koi8-r”
- So the whole thing will read as follows: Content-Type Contains charset=”koi8-r”
- Finally tell it what you want it to do with the message. I’d recommend setting it to move the message to the Junk Folder, marking it as read, and stop evaluating rules.
Contents of Rule
Really that’s it, simply hit okay, Apply the rules to your current Inbox, and you’ll be sending any messages with that Content-Type into your Junk or Trash folders. We hope this helps alleviate some of the spam you are receving. There are other ways to get rid of this kind of spam, but this seems to be the most obvious choice of action. Please let us know if this helps and how it’s working for you. Good luck.
October 27th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
A couple of notes on this one:
• as with most filters, this is pretty specific. charset=koi8-r is not the same as charset=”koi8-r”. You may have to augment the filter occasionally.
• this will only affect emails that have a declared charset, i.e. plain-text emails. If the text is HTML, then the content type will be MIME, and the charset will be called from within the HTML, which means that the filter won’t see it.
However, this kind of method should help you filter out a large majority of the foreign language junk mail you are receiving.
October 30th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
[...] Spam with foreign languages cannot be blocked simply based on the language it was written in. Why? Because we most likely have customers speaking that language, so blocking those messages based on that wouldn’t be fair to everyone using our services. It wouldn’t be cool for us to block all English emails would it? If you want to take this kind of spam head-on please see this article about rules and filters. [...]