Cannot filter mail based on contents of message body
I receive a lot of spam emails with one thing in common: In the body of the email, there is a hyperlink like this (which I copied from the "view source" screen of one of the emails, and I haven't reproduced in its entirety):
[bracket]a href="http://news.newsmax.com/?KKCRaThjmd
I figured it would be fairly easy to tell Thunderbird to filter out any email that contains "newsmax" in its body. I created a filter to do that (if Body contains "newsmax", set Junk status to "Junk").
Unfortunately, my filter doesn't work -- nothing happens. I've tried moving to a folder instead of marking as junk, and a couple of other things -- but the filter simply doesn't do anything.
I searched for a solution to this issue, and I found an article that says that for IMAP (which I'm using), you may need to create a "Body" tag -- even though a Body tag already exists in the filter dropdown list. This is the article: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Filters_%28Thunderbird%29
But that doesn't work either -- in fact, now I've simply got two "Body" entries in the filter dropdown; and I still can't filter the messages with "newsmax" in their body.
I'm hoping that someone here can provide some guidance that helps me solve this problem. Thanks for any help.
Modified by Chris
All Replies (4)
Evidently this spammer is doing something that prevents Thunderbird from recognizing what's in the body of the message. I can set up filters that work on the body of other (i.e. non-spam) messages, and those filters work just fine. Similarly, if I do Edit->Find->Search Messages and look for messages with some string in the body, that works OK too...
BUT: If I do "Search Messages" looking for "newsmax", I get no hits -- even though I've got several of these spam messages in my inbox that have "newsmax" in the body.
I am attaching an image file to show what the body of the message looks like, as well as some of the message headers. Perhaps someone will be able to tell me why this email body doesn't work with Thunderbird's filter and "Search messages" functions.
Thanks for any help.
I'm not up on the latest work in this area, but I've always thought that filtering on Body ignores text in html tags:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1211128
You might have to filter on another header, or add a custom header, if the spam includes a consistent string, such as cooldplaybest in the From header.
That's really unfortunate. Thank you for the reply, @sfhowes, and for the pointer to the bug report.
The spam doesn't include a consistent string other than "news.newsmax.com" in the link within the body. the string you mentioned is part of a gibberish domain name that the spammer changes.
In fact, as you can see, the body mostly consists of links to images (which contain the message that the spam delivers). So the only way to block this spam would be to filter on the contents of the hyperlink tag.
The bug report that you linked to is over 5 years old. If the developers (who seem to agree that this kind of filtering should be allowed) haven't managed to fix this in 5 years, they're clearly never going to get around to it. (Sure would be nice if there were a way to vote "me too" on a bug to show that I'm one of the users affected -- and perhaps bump the bug's priority.)
I've been using (and loving) Thunderbird since back before it was Thunderbird (Netscape Messenger, if I recall); but this new onslaught of unblockable spam may force me to look for a solution with stronger blocking and filtering capabilities. What a shame.
I can't speak for the value of TB's Junk Controls, but in my experience the spam filtering of the major mail providers that I use is quite effective, which makes sense given their resources and incentive to block spam (to focus your attention on their own ads).