[bostonluke]

Greetings -
I have found that I'm getting a lot of spam w/ a .zip attachment. From what I can see, Outlook's rule creation doesn't allow one to specify which kind of attachments to filter - seems to be all or none. Does anyone know how I might create a email rule to filter those w/ *.zip as attachments? Thanks in advance for any help.

Cheers.

[mphenterprises]

Hi BostonLuke and welcome to the PCWorld Communities. :D




I do not believe you can select the type of attachment you want to filter. Are the emails coming from the same email address, or the same domain? If so, you can block that domain or that email address. Please elaborate your concern and we can provide more assistance.

[bostonluke]

Hi,
I thought of that, but all have a unique email address and/or domain. The only thing that I can find in common is that they all contain a *.zip attachement. If there was some way to isolate that, my spam would drop considerably.
Cheers.

[mphenterprises]

Well, I have a couple of ideas:

- Depending on your email account, you may be able to filter out certain attachments on the front end so those emails would never reach your Outlook. I believe I have that option with GoDaddy.

- Depending on the level of valid emails with attachments you get, you can create the filter to send any email with an attachment to a certain folder; however, this will put all emails with attachments into that folder.

- If the spam email is not sent to you directly or if your name is not in the To: field, you can add an exception on that rule so that emails that are send to only you or emails with your name in the To: field do not go into this folder





This is a tricky situation. If I can think of anything else, I will post.

[smax013]

bostonluke said:

Greetings -

I have found that I'm getting a lot of spam w/ a .zip attachment. From what I can see, Outlook's rule creation doesn't allow one to specify which kind of attachments to filter - seems to be all or none. Does anyone know how I might create a email rule to filter those w/ *.zip as attachments? Thanks in advance for any help.

Cheers.

I believe that Outlook's junk mail/spam filter is a learning filter. I believe you can tell it that message is spam/junk. I am not sure how "smart" it is at learning...thus, I don't know if it will "learn" by remembering the email address or it is smarter than that. It could be worth a try. Have you tried that?

[bostonluke]

I have, thanks. or believe I have. the trouble I'm finding is that these dastardly spammers tweak the address/subject/message enough each time that the exact same info never seems to come through twice.

Cheers.

[smax013]

bostonluke said:

I have, thanks. or believe I have. the trouble I'm finding is that these dastardly spammers tweak the address/subject/message enough each time that the exact same info never seems to come through twice.

Cheers.

I figured that might be the case. Plus, I don't believe that Outlook's spam/junk function is that bright. You could consider getting a third party spam filter program. Some supposedly work rather well. Personally, I don't both. My spam filter (aka the delete key) works just fine for me and it is cheap! ;)



The best suggestion that I have, which you might already do, is maintain multiple email accounts. Have one that is your standard personal account that you only give to friends and family. Then have at least one other one that you use for websites, purchases, etc. When ever some entity asks for you email address, you the "junk" one. If you want you can use two junk accounts...one for more "reputible" sources that say you buy things from...and a second one for less reputible sources and for places that might make it more public (such as email lists or other services that might post the email address on the web in some form). I have operated this way for quite a while. While I do get some spam on my main email address, I don't get very much at all. I actually don't get a lot of spam on my "junk" account , but it is more than my main email address. I have another email address that I have used with a list server for years that has a public website archive of the messages...and it displays email addresses...this account gets literally about 100 to 200 spam messages a day. Fortunately, that email account runs on a service that run some spam filtering on the server...I generally don't like server side spam filtering...unless it just marks the supposed spam and allow me to sort it and then decide which I want to delete...which is the case for this email account. And it works rather well.