Possible to block incoming emails from certain IP addresses?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Atreyu
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Atreyu

Does anyone know how or of any free or inexpensive software that allows me
to block unwanted/unsolicited emails from certain IP addresses? I'm running
OE 6.0 as my email program. Apparently OE doesn't allow for blocking IP
addresses. It seems that my emails to the email server owner-culprits are
being ignored, and I really don't want to change my email address with my
current ISP. Any help from anyone would be appreciated immensely.
 
I am looking for some information pertaining to reporting/blocking as well. I
have AOL as my E-mail provider and Im sure I will be bombarded just for that
alone. I dont know which E-mail to use and really dont want to change my addy
either.
 
Atreyu said:
Does anyone know how or of any free or inexpensive software that
allows me to block unwanted/unsolicited emails from certain IP
addresses? I'm running OE 6.0 as my email program. Apparently OE
doesn't allow for blocking IP addresses. It seems that my emails to
the email server owner-culprits are being ignored, and I really don't
want to change my email address with my current ISP. Any help from
anyone would be appreciated immensely.
Click to expand...

You could use something like SpamPal with its RegEx plug-in (all free)
to let you define a regular expression to search in the headers for a
specific IP address. You can even define an expression that would only
look within the Received headers but those IP addresses will be for the
mail server so you would be tagging ALL e-mails that came from that mail
server, not just for a particular offending sender.

You could do a search on X-Originating-IP: <identity> but that is a
non-standard header. I know Yahoo and Hotmail add those headers (but
don't recall at the moment if they show an IP address, IP name, or a
hostname). AOL inserts their X-AOL-IP header, so you might check if
there is some X-<somestring>-IP header in the offending message. You
could check if there is a Return-Path header with the identity of the
offender, but that info was specified by the sender's e-mail client so
it could be falsified.

Outlook Express doesn't let you search in the headers except for the
standard set of To, Cc, Subject, and From, but Outlook lets you search
in the message headers for a substring anywhere (but it is a contiguous
substring so you cannot specify, say, to look for a substring within a
particular header but instead have to include the header's name followed
immediately by the value you are searching for; i.e., you cannot do a
search on "12.12.12.12" in just the X-Originating-IP header but you can
search on "X-Originating-IP: <12.12.12.12>").

With regular expressions in the SpamPal RegEx plug-in, you might be able
to specify in which header to do the search, or you could use an
expression like "^X-.*-IP:.*12\.12\.12\.12" (you'll have to understand
Perl-like regular expressions). I've never had to get that detailed on
filtering so there's a lot about the RegEx plug-in that I don't know
about, but you can inquire in the SpamPal RegEx forum
(http://snipurl.com/9htv).
 
Thanks very much for this info. I'll definitely look into it when I have a
free block of time as it seems it will require some "studying" on my part.
Anyway, I appreciate your suggestion and comments.
 
Hey there. This is so frustrating, but Vanguardx has responded with a
suggestion and comments. Read his response, and much good luck to you.
 
Atreyu said:
Thanks very much for this info. I'll definitely look into it when I
have a free block of time as it seems it will require some "studying"
on my part. Anyway, I appreciate your suggestion and comments.
Click to expand...

As an example of using Outlook's own rules to check for a particular
header with a specific value (which must be a substring right after and
contiguous to the header name), I use the following rule to trigger on
messages that SpamPal has tagged as spam:

Apply this rule after the message arrives
with "X-SpamPal: SPAM" in the message header
assign it to the "SPAM" category
and move it to the Junk folder
and stop processing more rules

My Junk folder has auto-archive enabled to permanently delete items over
1 day old (if I don't look at it and move it out that day then it's gone
but it affords me the chance to retrieve a false positive) and the
Preview pane is OFF for the Junk folder. I assign it to a category so I
can then customize the view for the Junk folder to use different colors
depending on the reason (i.e., category) for getting them moved there.
You can also add the Category column to the view if you want to see it
that way (so you have 2 indicators for the type of messages that got
moved into the Junk folder).

SpamPal will insert a header to identify if a message got tagged as
spam. It will optionally also insert a tag string in the Subject
header, like "**SPAM**", for email clients that can't search in the
headers, like Outlook Express, so you have SpamPal use either or both
methods to tag spam. The header name is "X-Spampal" and its value for
tagged messages is "SPAM" (it is "PASS" for non-tagged messages). So I
can use the rule in Outlook to look for a particular substring anywhere
in the headers, so by including the header name followed by its value
then I'm pretty sure that it will match against the header and its value
rather than somewhere else as a substring in some other header. That's
why I search on "X-SpamPal: SPAM" (header name, colon, space, value).

In the RegEx plug-in to SpamPal, it appears I can specify within which
header to do the search. So you could specify the string search only
look in a particular header. So the regular expression would declare
the scope of the search be the "X-SpamPal" header and look for
"12\.12\.12\.12" somewhere within it (the backslashes are escape
characters so the period gets treated as a period character rather than
as a wildcard character). If RegEx had not allowed you to specify the
scopy of the search to within a specific header name then you could
still do a search on "^X-SpamPal:.*12\.12\.\12\.12" which means to look
for that string to start at the beginning of a line (^ character), have
0 or more characters after the colon, and look for "12.12.12.12"
somewhere thereafter. Regular expressions can be very potent and very
helpful in specifying just where you want to search, and something that
has been lacking in many of Microsoft products.
 
Sorry I haven't thanked you for your time and your latest thoughtful
response. I can see I have my work cut out for me, but at least I have a
better idea how to go with this dilemma. Many, many thanks, pal. You take
care.
 
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