I came on here and found the answer to my initial question (Viagra spam using my own address), but in the process came up with these two questions:
In looking over my Console Log, I see countless errors noted—things fail to load, timed out, can’t be found, patches fail, can’t find function pointer, etc., etc. Is this normal? If so, no problem. Forgotten. But if it’s not normal, I’ll submit the log with a formal support request.
With all these Viagra problems, I often wonder why there isn’t just a list we could maintain, of specific words we want treated as spam when they occur anywhere in the email headers. For example, we enter “Viagra” in that list, and on that basis SpamSeive counts it as spam. There must be a reason why it can’t be this simple, yes?
It’s not normal to have errors from SpamSieve in the Console.
SpamSieve has a blocklist feature that can be used to do this. Some reasons that doing so might not be terribly useful:
There probably aren’t that many words you’d want to add; there are few words so spammy that they always mean a message is spam.
It’s easy to cause mistakes by adding words that seem spammy at the time but that actually appear in some of your good mail.
Most of the spams that would be caught by this type of blocklist rule are the obvious ones that SpamSieve would have caught on its own, anyway.
The remaining ones probably couldn’t be caught by the blocklist, anyway, because of its priority, e.g. if the sender is in your address book and you’ve told SpamSieve to use the address book, that will override the blocklist.
I have sooooo had it up to here with this ceaseless inundation with Viagra ads getting through. I put all my addresses but one into the block list (all but the one I sometimes use to copy myself), and now they’re using THAT one!
Thanks for mentioning the blocklist feature. I do want to add the word Viagra to it. There is no conceivable reason I’d need to worry about missing an email with the word Viagra in it. If a friend sends a joke about it, or even a serious comment about it, or even a scholarly study about it… so be it. I don’t care!
So please, would you be willing to post a copy of the exact wording of a blocklist line to add to add this word? I could try to adapt something already there, but I’d feel a lot safer if you wouldn’t mind posting the exact rule I should use.
Maybe somebody else would appreciate it too—after being duly advised re your thoughtful warnings and caveats.
However, I do not recommend doing this until after you’ve used the Open Log command to see why (or if) SpamSieve thought these messages were good. 99% of the time when spam messages containing such an obviously spammy word get through it’s because of a setup or training problem, and in that case adding a blocklist rule may not work, and either way it would be better to address the underlying problem.