One of our clients was getting a lot of spam in Russian on his Mac. Here’s how we created a specialized email filter to eliminate the Russian spam.

The transcript:

We have a saying around here at IvanExpert which is that there’s always a way.

One of our clients suddenly was getting an inordinate amount of spam from Russia, and many of these addresses contained “.ru.” So he asked me to create a filter for him which would automatically put into the spam folder anything which came from a .ru address.

His particular environment is on a system we set up for many of our clients called Hosted Exchange. It’s basically Microsoft Exchange Server except that you don’t have to own the server. The reasons why someone might want to be on Microsoft Exchange Server is a topic for another day. But that’s his solution.

And the thing is, [that filter] didn’t capture all the spam.

It turns out that a lot of his mail was not coming from .ru addresses, it was coming from .ee addresses and .com addresses, and [the filter] really wasn’t an effective tool.

So instead I thought, What can snag all of this Russian spam? I noticed that most of it did contain in fact some Russian in it.

I figured out what the most common letter in Russian is, it’s the letter “I,” which looks like a backwards N….I made a filter that any mail that contains a russian “I” character in it would automatically get put in the spam folder.

Now he is living happily ever after.