CC D wrote:
UPDATED: How do I block email addresses from unwanted spam. When I
get these emails I hit the spam button but they keep coming back. I
called them and I cant filter them by address because they change it
all the time. But I CAN filter it to spam when I filter out the
subject line or certain words in the subject line. Also if I include
keys words in the body of the email.
This is why blocking with filters is frustrating, and often futile. The
spammers randomize as much as they can, to make filtering difficult.
It's not just sender addresses, but relay server and wording in subject
lines and message bodies. Plus obfuscation of content, of things that
are visually similar, but different, such as substituting numeric "0"
for capital "O", numeric "1" and lower-case "l" or vertical bar "|".
For the purposes of filters, they're all entirely different, and as
such, make filter construction difficult.
If you want to make the effort for trying filters, your best bet is to
do a lot of them that are individually focused, rather than a single
filter that as a lot of "match any" conditions. The more conditions
you're checking for, the more complex the filter is, and
correspondingly, difficult to debug, and where you run significant risks
of both false positives and false negatives. And it's going to take a
lot of time to get things working properly. And given that many spam
operations tend to work in campaigns, where they blast you incessantly
for a few weeks, those campaigns usually end, and by the time you have
gotten your filtering mostly working, there's no more traffic for them
to filter. You're really not doing much more than playing "whack a mole".
In my view, the rules engine that is built into Mozilla mail clients
(both Thunderbird and Seamonkey) isn't especially robust, and where it's
hard to do a lot with Boolean conditions: AND, OR, NOT and grouping
withing parentheses.
I'm guessing that the bulk of your spam content is originating from a
single source. In you message headers there may be patterns that are
more easily recognizable (and more easily addressed with filters), but
it's probable that you're working against an experienced spamming
operation that knows how to cover their tracks well enough to make it
very difficult for you to try to defend yourself with client-based
filters. This is why using the Spam button provided by your mail
provider is usually more effective, because it enlists the power of the
server, and where processing can be done when messages are being
received by the server.
There is a lot of variance of how server spam filters are implemented
from provider to provider, and as has transpired in this discussion,
some providers' tools are more effective than others. One thing to be
aware of is that with server-based filters, the standard is that in
order to be adequately effective, a filter must be exposed to a minimum
of 100 samples of both spam and ham. It's entirely possible that your
server is seeing your spam designations and applying those to additional
traffic, but where each designation only increments the threshold by a
small amount. If this is the case, and you've marked a relatively small
number (even as many as a couple of dozen), you should keep marking the
messages as spam, and it's likely that eventually, the server will be
more severe in its evaluation of incoming messages from that source.
Beyond that, your only other options are to try to interact with your
mail provider's tech support -- for some providers, they may be able to
block identified sources if you give them sufficient samples to identify
-- or to abandon that email address entirely. Unfortunately, once a
spammer has your address, there's no way to prevent them from sending to
you.
One netiquette note: in this particular discussion, you've had lots of
responses to your original question. It's not necessary to reply to
each poster individually (especially with the same response). A simple
reply to your original post is sufficient.
Smith
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