Spam Posting

Otto

Is there anyway to create a Regex filter to filter out a poster who uses something like this: 46649977854aaa43ad0db3820d3a1gh5@0d3ce78cc38cadd234a895ab8c45887c.com
in the From: field, and something similar in the Subject: field that also changes each time he posts?

This is staring to pop up again, in a lot of newsgroups. This one was pulled from the MacOS X binary group.

Andre

You can try something like:

^[^\s]{60,}$

This matches any sequence of 60 or more characters that does not contain a space.

Otto

I’l try that for both Subject and Poster fields. Thank you. I take it that there is a space after 60 and the apostrophe. If there are less than 60 characters I can just change the number 60 to whatever is appropriate?

Andre

It means two things:
It only checks strings that are 60 characters or longer.
The ^\s indicates that the match succeeds only if there is no space anywhere within those 60+ characters..

Otto

Got it. So if another string is shorter than 60 characters can I just change the “60” to what is needed, as long as there are no spaces in the string? I think the filter worked but I’ll give it a couple of more days. Thanks so much for your time and guidance.

Andre

Yes, you can replace the value ‘60’ to whatever minimum length you want to check.

Otto

Thanks. The filter sort of worked. I set it up for Poster and Subject. I did notice tho that the subject line has 32 characters, then the “at” symbol and another 32 characters before the dot com. I’ll create two more filters using 32 characters and see how that goes. And to be clear, there is a space between the 60 and apostrophe, and the apostrophe and the curly braces?

Andre

Otto And to be clear, there is a space between the 60 and apostrophe, and the apostrophe and the curly braces?

No there isn’t a space at all in the string.

Otto

Interesting. The reason I asked is that the example appeared to have a space between the apostrophe and the 60 and curly brace. I’ll go back remove the spaces but they appear to work so far. Thanks so much.