|
Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Thursday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week |
|
|
March 17,
2005 How many ways can you misspell
Viagra? Or Building your own spam
traps with Outlook – part 2- There’s
a scene in the old folk movie “Alice’s restaurant “ based on the song by Arlo
Guthrie who got arrested for littering. He’s in jail surrounded by
tough looking bikers and inmates and when they ask him what he was arrested
for – he says “Littering ...” and they all move down the
bench away from him in disgust. With spam
being such a problem on the internet today, sometimes when you open your
email - if someone were looking over your shoulder – they might move
away in disgust too – because usually there’s a lot of
obnoxious words and phrases in
your email sent by spammers – so today we’ll work on eliminating
some of this obnoxious spam. Last week I went over the steps to
creating an Outlook Email rule which will trap spam – based on words in
the subject – and move the spam to your Junk Mail folder. These steps
are detailed in last week’s transcript which is on my Raw Bytes
website. Today
I’ll go over how
you can add words
and phrases to your spamtrap filter, and what to
watch out for. You may
have noticed that a lot of the spam you get has misspelled words in the
subject. This is because spammers are devious conmen who know that spam
filters are set to trap commonly used spam words – so they deliberately
misspell those words in their spam to you. For all
the obvious 4 letters words, you can just add those to your spam trap. Often spammers
will come up with some very creative spellings, using symbol characters and
numbers in lieu of the regular letters. This particularly applies to spam
words like Viagra Xanaax vicodin , and you need to
add them to your trap exactly as they’re sent to you. You can cut and
paste these
misspelled words from the original spam mail into your spam
trap – from the subject line. One thing
you have to watch out for is not to add a word or phrase to your spam trap
which might be sent to you by someone sending you a legitimate email. An
example might be the word medication – which is often used by spammers,
but might be part of an email sent to you by your doctor or a nurse. Another
thing I’ve noticed recently is a lot of Russian spam mail, in unique
Russian characters. I’ve cut and pasted several of those unique
characters individually to my spamtrap from Russian
spam, and reduced it virtually to zero. So this
week let’s add a few more words to our spamtrap. Open
Outlook and Click on Tools – rules and alerts – and highlight spamtrap – then click on the highlighted words from
last week - online pharmacy – and now you can add more words and
phrases – maybe a word like Viagra and a phrase like winning
notification then click Ok, then click apply. You should see all the words
you’ve typed, but eventually this list will get too big to view unless
you edit the rule. For this week you might try adding several new words and
phrases here, and then be sure to look in your junk mail folder to see if
they’re working ok. Remember that you can always test your spamtrap by sending an email to yourself with the spam
word in the subject, and then see it get directed to your junkmail
folder. Next week
I’ll talk about other rules you can create, like filtering out email
sent from a specific domain. For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2005 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html (509)624-7230 |
|