[pmmail-list] Ultra simple junk email filter

[Ralph Cohen]

A couple of weeks ago there was an ongoing discussion about filtering
junk mail during which I mentioned that I put all my email through a
series of white list filters first to sort the desirable email before
running them through my main junk filter (which I posted) that looks
for all the  words and codes, etc. present in most junk email.  Any
email not filtered gets sent to a separate folder for examination.

That discussion got me thinking about the processing burden caused by
my main junk mail filter that contains dozens of conditions so I tried
something different with pretty amazing results.  I noticed that almost
every junk email I receive is addressed to my email address but does
not include my name.  Therefore, I wrote a very simple filter to look
for that condition and to send those emails directly to my Junk folder.
 I placed it before my main junk mail filter and found that by itself
it caught about 98%+ of the junk mail.  This short circuited all that
mail having to filter through the long list of conditions in my main
junk mail filter and so lowered the processing burden.

I've been collecting the few emails that make it through new junk mail
filter and once I have enough, I think I'll be able to add one or two
additional conditions to the new simple junk filter to make it at least
as effective and far more manageable and less processing intensive than
my older main junk mail filter which I'll eventually disable.

Because of some oddities in processing of the filter language in the
latest Windows betas, I had to add parentheses to the filter to get it
to work as expected.  What I came up with is:

!(h.to="ralph")

This (complex) filter simply looks in the To: field of the header and
acts if it doesn't find my first name.

Of course, everyone's situation is different but if you are trying to
filter out junk email, you may want to see how effective a simple
filter like the one above could be for you.

Ralph Cohen
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