How do I filter out V 1 @ g R é spam?

[Atman]

This is nuts...they've figured out everything...I can't create enough filters for all the special characters. Now they do it to half the words in the body, so a generic filter would dump half my real mail. Anyone have any great solutions they've devised to stop this latest terroist assault on my mailbox?

[TlalocW]

1. I use knowspam.net

It will only allow emails from people I select (as well as automatically allow any new people I send an email to). There's still some deleting involved - every day I check my account to see what new email addresses are trying to contact me to make sure that any that I want aren't being blocked and then accept them (based on what the subject lines are). The rest I can check and click decline, and anything further from those people are blocked automatically. So you'll see the v1@gr@ subject lines, but they won't be delivered to your email, and once declined, the address that sent it to you will never make it past the filter again.

Oh, and it will probably work with whatever email system you currently use.

TlalocW

[Turbineguy]

2. I use Mailwasher

It's "free" they ask for a donation. You have to run it prior to your email program. I was getting ten spams a day from the same vendor. I filled in a form advising them that I would never, ever buy from them because of that. I did not leave my email address. The spam stopped. Maybe they figured out all the were doing was chasing away business.

http://www.mailwasher.net/

[Atman]

3. Apple Mail

It does have a junk filter which you can train, but by putting "real" names in the from field, most gets through anyway. I have to manually tell Mail to mark it if it hasn't marked it already and asked for confirmation. I can set up filters to block anything from anyone NOT in my address book, or from whom I've already accepted mail. But I run a public web site, and I get real, legit mail from unknown people. That just isn't practical. What sucks is that everything else worked until now. I've had almost NO spam problems until this newest assault.

On edit...

Maybe its not as hard as I thought we'll see if this works...a rule simply looking for "special characters" in the body text, the training Mail to treat it as junk. No one legitimate has ever sent me an e-mail filled with é and á characters. Them that do, well...they're trashed.