Outlook e-mail filter wildcards?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Space-G
  • Start date Start date
S

Space-G

Does the outlook e-mail filter search for literal keywords only or is it
versatile enough to handle wildcards? (i.e., "*refinan*" vs
"refinance") I ask because now when I examine the source of my
e-mails, spammers are beginning to use tags invisible to the reader
"<!--" and "-->" to break up every word in the entire e-mail to defeat
the Outlook filter. Not having wildcard flexibility is very
frustrating.

--Chuck
 
Unless regular expressions showed up in Outlook 2003, nope, no
wildcards. I use SpamPal to detect spam (based on *where* it
originates, not on its content). However, I also have its Bayesian
plug-in installed and enabled which statistically weights the words in
the message to determine how spammy is a message and to mark it as spam
beyond a specified threshold. However, I have informed the plug-in
author that it will not work when spammers interject bogus XML-like tags
within the message. From his replies, it looks like the next major
version of his plug-in will strip out the HTML/XML tags so it will
detect the words (so it scans the same text that you see rendered).
Don't know when he'll get to it, though. There is a RegEx (regular
expression) plug-in that might provide useful. I haven't used it yet
because my ISP's spam filtering, SpamPal with its Bayesian and
HTML-Modify plug-ins, and about a dozen rules in my client get rid of
the spam.

Next in the pipeline that I'd like to see is the conversion of numeric
ISO entities in the form "" get converted to their actual
characters (if printable) or to their "&name;" format (which would help
the user identify the character, like "&nbsp;" for the non-blocking
space character). And somewhere I'd like to have the obfuscated URLs
get interpreted and replaced so you can see just where your browser
would head if you clicked on it. Filter out all the invalid parameters
between the <A>...</A> tags. For the text shown for the displayed link,
hide the crap between "http://" and a "@", if the "@" exists, in the
URL (since you shouldn't need a username and password to just visit
their site), and hide everything past the "?", if present, in the path
portion of the URL (since you don't care about the parameters [for
redirection]).
 
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