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Toby Howard :: Toby's Tips :: Foreign-language spam A simple tactic for identifying spam mail written in languages you're not interested in is to note that many such messages list a Windows encoding (usually a one-byte encoding) in their Subject line. For example, this mail Subject: Важная информация для Руководителя has this message source: Subject: =?windows-1251?B?wuDm7eD/IOjt9O7w7OD26P8g5Ov/INDz6u7i7uTo8uXr/w==?= ("The important information for the Head", according to rustran.com.) So, make a filter in your mailreader to look for mails with Subject lines containing "windows-1251" and chuck them away. You might also include another common Russian encoding, koi8. There are lots of Windows encodings (Microsoft page): 1250 (Central Europe) So you can choose whichever you don't fancy. Of course there are other ways to encode non-English characters (UTF-8 etc) so this simple scheme won't work on those. But it does seem to catch a lot of spam, especially cyrillic. |