Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Fighting spam with GMail


This won't be a post related to programming. However I find this useful to fight spam with GMail.

I usually get a lot of spam in my gmail account, probably because my name and surname are quite common (?) or who knows why. GMail filters spam quite good and once they're detected they're are sent to the Spam tab/mailbox. Since no system is perfect there are some non-spam emails that are treated as spam by gmail so I spend/waste some minutes every day to see if I can rescue a misreported spam email.
I know most of the spam contain some specific words so I tried using google's search engine inside GMail to simplify this horrible task. Here is what I copy-paste to the GMail search bar:

in:spam pharmacy | cialis | viagra | replica | rep1ica | buy | cird | bedroom | watches | pills

The OR operator works great and then I can delete the messages that meet that criteria without worrying (well, I do worry a little but less than deleting them without any filter at all).

I can say that 60% to 80% of spam I get contain one of those words.

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