Apple Mail Rule To Stop Asian, Arabic And Other Non-Latin Character Spam

I’ve been receiving a huge amount of Asian spam lately. Actually, I think its more accurate to say, I think I’ve been receiving spam because to be honest with you, I can’t read anything in the emails at all except a hyperlink or two.

There are many methods to blocking non-Latin character spam. Many non-Latin filters work on the ‘Content-Type’ of message sent in the email header. The recent batch of Asian spam messages I’ve been receiving has been spoofing the ‘Content-Type’ to make it appear as if the message type is Western. This renders ‘Content-Type’ filter rules worthless.

As I said earlier, I can’t read a thing in these messages. The current batch has no English in the message body at all.

By applying an old school type of filter to the message body, I’ve been able to catch 100% of the Asian spam that is making it through my server side filters.

The Apple Mail Rule I created to filter the messages is so simple it will only work on this current batch of spam emails and will not work as soon as they start injecting random English phrases into the message as most other spammers do.

To block the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and other non-Latin character spams that contain no English in the body of message, create an Apple Mail Rule that deletes content if the message body does not have the words “a, the, of, and, is”. Its pretty difficult to compose a message in English without those words.

This is only a quick fix and there are many more labor intensive, server side methods for filtering Chinese, Japanese, Korean and any other non-Latin character spam messages out there and most of them work well. Any Apple Mail Rule should only be the last line of defense against spam. Try to get your mail server in shape before relying on Apple Mail Rules.