I'm trying to create a mail flow rule which will delete emails whose subject header is utf-8 encoded. What this means is that the email subject would start with  =?utf-8?

However, I can't seem to create a rule that does this.  I Tried:

Subject matches these text patterns ... '=\?utf-8\?'

also tried

A message header matches ...  'Subject' header matches '=\?utf-8\?'

However, both doesn't work.  Any ideas or help would be much appreciated. 

Thanks!

Hi ,

Q1.)Could you please explain us why you are trying to delete the emails which contains the character set "=\?utf-8\?"  in the headers ?

Q2.)Are you getting any spam emails which contains that particular character in the headers ?

Hi,

Q1 - 99% of my spam have chinese characters in the subject, which use either utf-8, gbk, gb2312, or gb18030.  I don't want to filter based on the encoding of the email as a whole, because there are some ham emails that I receive which are encoded in utf-8, gbk, gb2312, or gb18030.  What i want is to filter emails whose subject alone is encoded in the mentioned character sets. 

Q2 - I'm getting a lot of spam emails containing utf-8 encoding on the subject header, not necessarily on the whole email header.

My suspicion is that the Exchange regex engine does matching based on the encoding of the source.  What I want is for the regex engine to match based on single-byte characters, ignoring any character encodings on the source. 

Hi ,

By using content filter agent You can block those emails based upon the character set .But i would not suggest you to go with that option.

First of all you need to check the anti spamming solution that you are using in your Gateway product.

I would suggest you to  submit those spam email samples to the vendor of your Anti Spam product .So that they will update those samples on their product to block such kind of emails.

Hi,

My suggestion is to create a transport rule to block the incoming message which include some characters in the message subject and body. The character is a word which is frequent used in the language. For example, following characters are frequent used in Chinese: ,, , , ...... They are almost used in any Chinese article or document.

This way can be used for blocking other language.

Best Regards.

Hi S.Nithyanandham,

Thanks for your reply. However, your suggestion of blocking emails based on character set is unacceptable.  As mentioned, I do get emails that are valid but are utf-8 encoded. So blocking an email based on character set as a whole is unacceptable. 

My requirement is straightforward: block emails whose subject header is utf-8 encoded, regardless of the character encoding of the email as a whole.  Can this be done?

Thanks,

Philip

Hi Lynn-Li,

Thanks for the suggestion. However, I need to filter the subject alone.  I don't want to filter the body of the email, as I do get some valid emails which have chinese characters in the body. 

All I need is to block emails whose subject contains chinese characters.  Unfortunately, the common words you suggested are absent in a lot of email subjects which I want to filter.  What I want to do is fairly simple: block emails whose subject is utf-8.  Can this be done?

Thanks for all the help!

Hi ,

Thanks a lot for reply .

Even i would not suggest you to block the entire character set as this will block the genuine emails too .

Could you please tell us the Anti Spamming solution that you are using in your Gateway products ?