[gunnar]

How can I make a rule in Mail to catch e-mails with no content in the body. For some reason I get hundreds of blank e-mails everyday and the Junk filter doesn't learn them.

[Mike S.]

I don't get nearly that many, a few a week maybe but I also found them annoying.

Sadly, I found no solution to address the issue directly so I set up a rule that basically says that if the Email isn't addressed to any of my email addresses then just move it to the trash.

Most of those things appear to go out via BCC so they'd get trashed; the downside to a set-up like the above is that some newsletters or mailing lists aren't directly addressed and get trashed so you'd have to set up a filter to accommodate them or manually grab what you want out of the trash.

[WJMoore]

How about you create a rule that flags a message as junk if it does not contain a space. I can think of very few false positives that is likely to produce.

[typoon]

Originally posted by Mike S.:
Most of those things appear to go out via BCC so they'd get trashed; the downside to a set-up like the above is that some newsletters or mailing lists aren't directly addressed and get trashed so you'd have to set up a filter to accommodate them or manually grab what you want out of the trash.

Why not just setup the rule in the filter? You can or should be abl eto set it up to say that if it is from this sender move to inbox or something like that. wouldn't that work? Hopefully smart mailboxes in Tiger will improve on mail filtering.

[gunnar]

The "space" filter is the closest yet but that would exclude one word e-mails. I wouldn't want to lose all the "OK, No, Later," e-mails I get. I'll have to think of a secondary condition as well...

[Mike S.]

I think I tried space and found it didn't work... maybe I set it up wrong.

I don't use filters often so I'm not sure of their full capabilities, on the upside using the "not to me" approach eliminates some SPAM as well as the blanks because it's all mass mailing and much of it isn't directly addressed.

[WJMoore]

I set up a rule as shown below before posting above and it worked as expected.



As for a secondary rule that is a bit more of a challenge. However if you set it up to never flag emails from people in your past recipients list as junk, then it should never pick up one word emails like ok that are most likely a reply to an e-mail you sent and therefore the address is known.

Another option might be JunkMatcher, which allows more powerful pattern matching (regular expressions) of emails.

And lastly if you are really keen you could set up procmail to retrieve and process all your mail into a local UNIX mailbox and then set up mail to read that UNIX mailbox.

[gunnar]

The thing I don't get is that there's an option of "if equal to" and you should be able to put nothing in there so it catches message content equal to nothing.