I've posted about e-mail filtering before, and the hope that chandler
will support some advanced filtering options, and this is one more
possibility I'd like to suggest.
Obviously spam is a problem we all have to deal with, and although
spam filters have come along quite a bit in the past few years, they
can't cover all possibilities. One area of spam that I've noticed
spam filters have a lot of trouble with is phishing-type e-mails
addressed from popular sites like ebay, amazon, etc. Obviously if you
want e-mails from these sites (and have filters to organize them)
then some of the phishing e-mails will make it through. Some spam
filters have started to address this issue by looking for phishing-
style links, but this is a difficult task.
Ebay, in response to these phishing e-mails, has started putting
one's ebay id in all of the e-mails they send, so you know it's
coming from them. This is a great idea. I would imagine other sites
will follow this, since spammers in theory cannot know one's id on a
given site (assuming the site doesn't show e-mail addresses or that
it hasn't been hacked).
This opens up a great way to eliminate phishing e-mails from these
types of sites. For ebay, for example, I would set up a filter that
would look for e-mails coming from ebay.com - and then check if my
username is included in the e-mail - if my username is not included
in the text, then the e-mail is sent to the trash. If the username is
found, then a different action can be triggered.
In fact this can be generalized to allow other functionality. For
example, you add one or more filters that must be matched (i.e. from
address includes ebay.com) and then you add a conditional set of
filters (i.e. text contains my username) and then specify actions
that are carried out for both the true (i.e. filter into an 'ebay'
folder) and false (i.e. move to trash) possibilities of the second
set. The true/false option might be compared to an 'if/then/else'
function.
You might also allow multiple conditional responses. This would be
useful for sites that send out multiple mailing lists from the same
generic e-mail address. I have some mailing lists I get from the same
site, where the e-mail address is always the same and they don't even
put the mailing list title in the subject. In this case I could
create the initial requirement being the e-mail address and then
search for specific text in each e-mail to match up with each mailing
list, and then filter accordingly.
That's it,
Philip Trauring
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