A filtering question, not taxonomy

[Mary Barkworth]

Here are the various suggestions that I received on filtering out
unwanted email.  Almost all work on any email, English or otherwise and
regardless of alphabet.  I thank everyone that took the time to reply,
on or off line.  

SIMPLEST APPROACH
The simplest suggestion- and one that I should have been aware of but
wasn't - was to use Outlook's tool for handling Junk mail.  

"If you use Outlook or Outlook Express there is a way of blocking mail
from a specific sender. Highlight the message, go to Message on the
Taskbar and choose (click on) Block sender".

On the version that I have, Outlook 2000, one can set up a rule for
moving mail to either a junk email or an adult email folder. Then all
one does is right click on the message and send it to the appropriate
folder. My understanding is that then one will no longer receive emails
from that address.  

Several people mentioned that Eudora has a similar facility.  

SOFTWARE
Sven mentioned a program and gave some additional advice (which was also
stated by others): 

Don't click on anything on those pages, and do not in any way verify
that you have received the spam, e.g., 
by trying the "remove from list option; it will increase your spam load.

Our museum mailserver has the following spam filter engine, which marks
all suspected spams (could also delete them on the server). It catches
100 percent of the spam and only very very few normal messages are
marked as spam. (I receive about 20-30 spams daily because the e-mail
lists I maintain are favorite targets.)

http://www.spamassassin.org/

Spamnix have a shareware version for Eudora mail clients
http://www.spamnix.com/buy.html


KOREAN

"I get maybe 20 Korean spams a day, and two or three from Taiwan each
week. In Eudora, I filter on ?$?i in the subject (which is what the
Korean word for "advertisement" looks like when rendered in Latin-1), on
ks_c_5601-1987 in any header line (it is a common Korean character set),
and co.kr in the "from" field (although Korean spammers, like those
elsewhere, often forge 
email addresses). That seems to get about 75% of the spam, but for some
reason, Eudora forces me to filter around half of it manually (it
survives the automatic scan). So I'd be glad to learn of a better
solution, too". [The critical portion of this paragraph, the characters
to filter on, may not go through to everyone, according to the warning I
am receiving. I do not know how to fix that] I shall try sending it in
unicode and the default way but I have no knowledge of what people will
receive].  

Jacques was correct. I have found people on this list to be helpful in
the past, in matters taxonomic and non-taxonomic. It is the only
listserver that I am on, so I thought I would ask. I am glad that I did
because there evidently are ways of decreasing the amount of spam one
receives that I did not know. I am going to try the simply approach
first.

Mary