Total Nonsense

As some of you out there know, the Mozilla foundation (makers of the popular "Firefox" web browser ) also offer a free e-mail client called "Thunderbird". Now this particular product (totally free of course) fits somewhere in functionality between Microsoft Outlook Express (which comes free with Windows) and the very pricey full version of MS Outlook. One area that Thunderbird excels at is in catching and filtering spam.

However, all e-mail clients have a bit of issue with a new spam technique being used these days that combines text saved as an image (usually used to manipulate penny stocks or sell you viagra). Without some kind of special intervention, these e-mails tend to slip past a lot of filters causing a lot of aggravation.

Now the techique mentioned in the article linked below does a great job of getting rid of this sort of spam, but unfortunately can have some false positives (people sending you messages with embedded images that you actually don't want filtered). However, by making one simple addition

The secret is this. Follow the steps outlined in the original article linked below, and set up the intial rule as explained. If you want, just follow the technique outlined in the article below and then just go in and edit the rule afterwards to add the new conditions (tools -> Message filters -> edit).

Neil's World: Stopping image spam in Thunderbird

Stopping image spam in Thunderbird Via TUAW I found this Mail.app rule for stopping image spam, where the body of the spam message is in an image and is usually trying to get you to buy penny stocks. Because these messages use images and not actual text, they often evade spam filters.

But before you accept the rule, you need to add an exception to it for people you know (i.e. people in your address book) to cut down on false positives. To do so, you tell Thunderbird (when setting up the rule) that two conditions must be met for the rule to be in effect.

First, make sure the option that says "match all of the following" is selected. This tells Thunderbird that all conditions must be met for the rule to be used. The first part of the rule (first condition) needs to be set as in the article linked here.

After the first condition is entered clicking one of the buttons with the "plus" sign "+" will allow a second conditions to be added.

In the first field, click on the drop down box and select "From" (meaning that you're matching who the mail is from).

In the second field, click the drop down box and select "Isn't in my address book" (meaning that the mail must also be coming from someone not in your address book to be effective in addition to containing an embedded picture).

Here's an image showing how the final rule/filter should look.

As in the article, I suggest the action to set for e-mail meeting these criteria is to move it to junk mail folder rather than deleting it. That way if a false positive does get through, you can deal with it appropriately. Since no mail coming from someone in your address book will be filtered, the best way to fix a false positive is to simply add that sender to your address book. This can be done very simply by right clicking the "from" address on the falsely filtered mail and selecting "add to address book". From then on, mail from that address will go through.

I've been testing this and have had very good success getting rid of this rather egregious spam flood we've all been subjected to. False positives (with the exception set up as noted above) have been very few. Give it a go and I don't think you'll be disappointed.