Cannot filter email that has no sender
Recently, spammers have adopted the method of somehow sending the email with no sender email address.. e.g. "JoeBlow <>" as the sender. I don't know how they are accomplishing it, but the result is that I cannot filter the spam to my trash or junk directory using the Thunderbird mail filters. If it was from "JoeBlow <>" every time it could be done but they change the from with each mailing so I cannot filter them... I thought that the filter for ANYONE NOT IN MY ADDRESS BOOK would handle it, but because the sender is essentially (null), the filter doesn't handle it. Maybe because there are mailing groups in the Address Book that just have a group name and no email address attached to the group so TBird thinks that the sender IS in my address book. Anyway, I would like to request and enhancement to the message filtering that would allow users to filter such spam appropriately.
I realize that enhancements are done by volunteers and I hope that someone with the skill set to make this fix will be willing to take up the challenge for the benefit of the user community. I am sure that I am not the only user being spammed in such a way. TIA
All Replies (3)
The "From:" field is essentially part of the message text; it isn't used in routeing, so doesn't need to pass any validity checks. So software written specifically for spammers may well be designed to take advantage of this.
The FiltaQuilla add-on will let you use regular expressions. I haven't seen any of these empty "from:" address messages myself, but I am confident that a regular expression could be formed to deal with them.
A trivial first guess might be that there isn't an '@' in them, so a test for an absent '@' might do the trick. I am not sure that Thunderbird's built-in filters can "see" the '@', but I do believe that FiltaQuilla's regular expressions do.
So,
From (RegEx)|Doesn't match|@
might do it.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/filtaquilla/
Modified by Zenos
Thank you for the reply.. I'm not sure if it will work or not, but I will try the "straight-up" Thunderbird filter for not containing "@" first.. If that doesn't work, I'll give filtaquilla a shot. Thanks again.
If Thunderbird developers are watching this queue, please consider a more permanent and native option for these spammers.
ddenby said
Thank you for the reply.. I'm not sure if it will work or not, but I will try the "straight-up" Thunderbird filter for not containing "@" first.. If that doesn't work, I'll give filtaquilla a shot. Thanks again. If Thunderbird developers are watching this queue, please consider a more permanent and native option for these spammers.
Developers do not watch the forum, but we have a spam filter and at least in my case has done good things for me for a decade almost.
The use of manual filters to manage spam is at best impossible to maintain in the long term. My mother would have described it as a fools errand. That is why Thunderbird filter is a learning filter.