I call it spam because anything that makes it to my inbox in Russian can’t be legit, because I don’t speak Russian (I’m assuming it’s Russian; it looks Russian to me, so for the sake of this article, I’m going to refer to it as Russian). If I didn’t ask for it, didn’t sign up for it, and don’t have any friends that speak Russian, it has to be spam.
Thing is, Google doesn’t think it’s spam. One of my domains is hosted with Google Apps, and I get at least 50 e-mails a day in Russian. I can report these as spam until I’m blue in the face but they continue to wiggle into my inbox for me to manually delete. Whether someone added this e-mail address to a mail-order brides mailing list, or some other cruel trick, I’ll never know.
I was having to delete so many of these e-mails that I thought, “there has to be a way for me to get rid of these without a manual delete of each one.” As I said, I don’t speak Russian, but the through occurred to me. One of these Russian characters has to be the equivalent of the English letter ‘a’ or ‘e.’ If I can find that character, and create a filter that automagically moves any e-mail with that character in it to the trash, I’m golden.
So, I experimented, creating different filters where my criteria was a single Russian character, and when an e-mail had that character in it, move said e-mail directly to the trash.
After a few tries… paydirt! I began filtering any and all messages with this character:
и
to the trash. Guess what. No more spam in my inbox.
Okay, that’s not totally true. I still get the occasional spam message, but since I’ve had that filter in place I’ve gotten maybe five Russian e-mails in my inbox, and that filter’s been in place for a good two months. After the deluge of Russian e-mails I was getting before, I can easily live with five Russian e-mails in my inbox over the course of two months.
If you’re dealing with what I was dealing with, give this a shot and let me know how it works for you.
spam, russia, russian, e-mail, google apps, shawnw
