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O.T. Spam

I thought I'd got my Thunderbird set up to mark as 'read' the paranoid idiot who spams on all NGs about MI5 persecution!

He's now starting to obfuscate the headers with spaces, single quotes and commas - and they're slipping through.

Does anyone who uses Thunderbird, use a filter or add-on that stops the current flood of spam from this idiot?

I've used Spamassain in the past which worked well with Mutt on Linux, but as I use Photoshop on this machine I'm stuck with XP.

In the end, I may have to subscribe to news.individual.net, which I've used in the past (when it was free!). Does anyone know if this server is on top of the MI5 spammer?

Jim Ford

Reply to
Jim Ford
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Can Thunderbird use a filter like Subject: (MI5 or (M & I & 5))

Steve

Reply to
Steve Wolstenholme

Thanks - I'll give it a try, but I get the impression that the Thunderbird filtering rules are rather simplistic, and I've not seen reference anywhere that you can use boolean operators or regular expressions.

Jim

Reply to
Jim Ford

Just be aware that by posting filters, the lunatic will learn how to work around it next time.

Reply to
Andrew Rossmann

Very good point!

Jim

Reply to
Jim Ford

  1. Scream at your ISP/News_provider - most of them with clue managed to figure out their customers may leave if they don't filter. See also the moderated group 'news.admin.net-abuse.policy'
  2. Get a real news reader, not some toy oversexed web browser
  3. Learn regular expressions

The best solution is to have your ISP handle the problem. If they won't do so, and you absolutely must stay with them, change to a less incompetent news provider, like individual.net.

Filtering - I'm seeing posts in other newsgroups that the nutcase is using multiple newsgroups in a single post. A decent news reader or spooling tool can filter on the eight headers your news provider supplies in answer to the 'XOVER' command: (From:, Subject:, References:, Date:, Bytes:, Lines:, Message-ID: and Xref:). Thus filtering for articles cross-posted to 4 or more newsgroups should do the trick. Regular expressions will also defeat the obfuscated headers, whether 'M.*I.*5.*P' or what-ever - look it up.

Isn't needed if you are using a real news reader

Don't like the free alternative called GIMP? What-ever.

Many providers are handling it well.

Old guy

Reply to
Moe Trin

Jim, Is your email as shown in the headers viable? I have a simple filter that seems to be working unless he has just coincidentally stopped posting. At least I've received none of his posts since installing it in T-bird. I hesitate to post it online as the idiot might figure a work-around as was suggested.

Bud

Reply to
Bud

Does Thunderbird filter on the message-id header? If so, filter on that line. All of those posts have the same last characters in the message id... "@4ax.com".

Reply to
Barry R West

Thanks, but I've just ditched TB and am now trying Gravity, which has much more sophisticated filtering.

Thunderbird only filters on 'subject' and 'from'.

Jim Ford

Reply to
Jim Ford

Bad idea. That is used by forte Agent if the user doesn't set his own domain in the configuration.

Reply to
Jens Hoffmann

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