"Julian Milano" said in news:
[email protected]:
I would like to setup a rule which will trigger on blank subject
lines, subject lines with *only* "FW:" or "RE:" (ie. I still class
these as blank subject lines).
How do I do it?
So what are blank lines? Those without any characters. Look at the
rules. Notice there are many 'exception' clauses. So think in reverse.
Instead of testing if an e-mail has a blank Subject which then gets
rejected, instead reject all e-mails unless they have at least one
character in the Subject.
Apply this rule after the message arrives
move to Junk (or [permanently] delete or whatever default action you
want)
except if the Subject contains "a" or ... "z" or "0" ... or "9"
stop processing more rules
You end up having to specific the 26 alphabetic single characters (and
optionally the 10 numeric characters). If the Subject doesn't contain
at least one alphanumeric character then it is considered a blank header
(something like "#(*>-+,.!" would *not* be considered a legit Subject
and also considered a blank line).
This will not work on forwarded e-mails in which "FW:" got prepended to
the Subject. Same if a reply prepends a "RE:" string. Obviously they
at least one alphanumeric character. You might want to include the
testing of numerics if you feel a Subject should contain some alphabetic
text in it. I have a rule as above and am now considering removing
numerics from the test (i.e., the sender has to put something in the
Subject besides just numbers).
Outlook doesn't support regular expressions (I don't know about OL2003).
So you cannot test for substrings (and omit other substrings, like a
leading "RE:" or "FW:"). There are some anti-spam products, like
SpamPal with its regex plug-in, that might let you go beyond what
Outlook provides.
