I am reposting since my original message seems to somehow gotten mangled. I am plagued with multiple spam messages every hour. I get 30-40 per day every single day, day after day after day. The spammer is clever and has managed to elude being caught by the Bayesian filtering of both Gmail and Thunderbird so they pretty much all end up in my 'Inbox'. (he is spoofing the sending domain with 128 random characters so no two messages are ever seen to be from the same sender). Very frustrating!! But there is a possible way to trap and discard this trash **IF** I can use Unix style regular expression wild cards in my filter rules. My question is this when setting up a new email filter in Thunderbird, what (if any) wild cards are supported in "Sender Contains" argument field? For example can I use ".........." to match any 10 character string? I need to be able to specify the number of characters I want to match, so something like "*" would not work since it matches without regard to the number of characters. I need to specify how many characters are to be matched. I can supply details as to why this is needed, but I won't bore you with the details unless you ask. Thanks for any input.