Re: may a "wild card" be used to block senders?

Tech-Archive recommends: Fix windows errors by optimizing your registry

Basically, it would be a lot less work and many
magnitudes more efficient to simply switch to using
blocklists aka MailWasher and many other programs
available either free or for a small fee these days.
Then you CAN block all known spam sites those
blocklists know about, all of China, all of Russia, all
of Brazil, etc etc etc. After that comes using an ISP
that tags e-mails as possibly spam so you can sort them
out later at your leisure after glancing to see if
there are any from's that mistakenly got thru to that
folder. Better yet is the ISP that lets me determine
what's spam and what isn't. But I never need to; block
lists are very, very effective at preventing spam and
personally I've never had a mistaken e-mail. And I do
get e-mails from Canada and Japan to here in the US.

OE is simply inherently weak at defending against
today's spammers. It just isn't designed to do it and
never will as OE6 is the end of the line for "OE".

There is some decent information there, but also a
couple of problems I'd like to point out, from the
viewpoint of why it wouldn't work for me and that
possibly others should be aware of:

You said the x) para's 3 thru 5 I am commenting on:
3) I also filter on Undisclosed-Recipient. I,
personally don't like Bcc: messages so they're dumped
into the Deleted Items folder or removed from the
server.

It's bad IMO because it encourages people who might
want to broadcast something I'm interested in, to put
the e-mail addresses in the clear (To: or CC:), which
is a terrible idea. It also appeases my daughter and a
couple of other favorite people who like to send out
what they think are little funnies, but it's the
valuable information I'm really interested in.

I do NOT want my e-mail address in the clear if it's
going to people other than myself, so I'd much rather
see "Undisclosed Recipient" and sure don't need those
other people's addresses on my system either.
IMO it's a chance to miss good-mail and without
further processing is useless in any way I can see.

To my way of thinking, it is folly to EVER delete
anything sight unseen. I don't mean you should read
spams: I mean you should always glance at who a mail
is from. If it's an undisclosed recip, then who's it
from? By now you know whether it's anything to read or
not. But you lose that ability with #3.

4) I filter on empty To: or Cc: lines and empty From
lines. You'll see some spam e-mail that those lines are
empty. So since it's 99.9999999% of the time, spam I
dump that off the server and never see it.

OR? That means if either one is empty, not both empty,
then you're dumping it right off the server to never be
seen again. At first I thought it was a typo, but your
rules example is the same thing. AND is the function
you want there, not OR.

5) I filter on some keywords, such as "Investigate" and
various forms of it. These morons sending spam on how
to investigate someone is a joke. The info they give
and some of the software they sell is just a list of
things anyone would think of.

A losing battle. In order for this to work, you're
going to end up with one gargantuan filter eventually
that makes sure the tortioise wins the race by many
magnitudes. In general it's a thankless effort and in
reality one that needs to be kept up and managed almost
daily. You're furhter ahead IMO with bayesian filters
which also aren't all that successful. At best it's a
recipe for false confidence for a short period of time.

6) Now, my last rule is e-mail that is sent from
replies to my posts in the newsgroups or from my web
site (old but still gets a lot of hits) from everyday
people but it's moved into a "Stuff" folder. It's mail
I'll read but it's not as important and that in my
Inbox. I do get to it quickly but it's secondary..

That's probably reasonable, although personally if it's
worth reading or needs to be checked, I just leave it
in the Inbox with the exception of a few highly
important "must respond asap" folks I work with.

Regards,

Pop`




PA Bear wrote:
Filter /in/ your messages!
http://www.mindspring.com/~majik/messagerules.htm

JDoe wrote:
Aww, sheesh. Lousy. And this guy keeps changing
ISP's and webmail
addys. In any event, thanks for the response.

Regards.


"PA Bear" <PABearMVP@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Ol38rpSOIHA.5720@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
No, and No.
--
~Robear Dyer (PA Bear)
MS MVP-Windows (IE, OE, Security, Shell/User)
AumHa VSOP & Admin http://aumha.net
DTS-L.ORG http://66.39.69.143/

JDoe wrote:
May a wild card such as the asterisk (*) be used
to block senders?
For example, if I add "JohnDoe@*.net" to my "block
sender list,"
will OE6 block
John Doe's email from any domain with a ".net"
address? Or
"JohnDoe@*.com"
?

May the asterisk wild card be used to "not
download" or "delete
from server"
. . . all of John Doe's email message if I also
add
"JohnDoe@*.net" and JohnDoe@*.com ?

Thanks for responses.

Outlook Express 6
XP Home, SP 1



.

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