Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Filter for Spam on GMail

I've been getting a ton of spam on GMail lately that falls into two categories: Russian-language spam, and another spam with several variations, of the form:

  • Hello! I am bored this evening. I am nice girl that would like to chat with you
  • Hello! I am bored this morning. (etc)
  • Hello! I am tired this evening. (etc)
  • Hello! I am tired this morning. (etc)
  • And so forth...
So I've been honing a Gmail filter that knocks both out at once. So far I don't have any false positives, and I have about 5000 legitimate emails and 5000 spams in my gmailbox. Create a filter, and in the box for "has the words," just paste:

и|KOI8|windows-1251|("Hello! I am" (tired|bored) (today|tonight|this))

You can also test this against your mailbox in general by putting that exact text in the search box in gmail, and if you want it to search everything, add a space and then in:anywhere.

If you have any other filtering tips, post a comment.