A Different Perspective

If you’re web host uses cPanel there’s a great function which is not often used where you can filter messages prior to being delivered to anyone’s inbox.

If you’re among the many, many people receiving spam which has as it’s subject “It’s name : )” where name is a different name every time, you can write a regular expression in cPanel’s email filter which will stop those emails from being delivered.

I know I lost some of you with the term “regular expression” but you don’t really need to understand it to use it. Here’s what you need to do:

Login to your cpanel and click on the “Mail” icon.

Click on “Email Filtering.”

Click on “Add Filter.”

In the Filter line the default should be “Subject.” Leave that the way it is. Change the box that defaults as “contains” to “matches regex.” In the input box, type: It\’s (.*) \:

Click the “Activate” button.

This will filter out any email which starts with “It’s” and then contains text and then has a colon. I tested this filter, and if I used the subject, “It’s a doozie” that message was still delivered, while “It’s Alan : )” was discarded. The filter works properly.

Of course if someone actually sends you an email like that it will filter it out, too, but it’s pretty unlikely they would start it with “It’s” and have a : later in the subject line.

So that little filter should greatly reduce the spam you’re getting if you’ve been hit with the “It’s name : )” spam deluge that’s been rocking the web.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 9th, 2006 at 1:21 pm and is filed under Announcements, Life, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.