How to filter based on "garbage" subjects ... ?

[Pat Lashley]

--On Tuesday, September 30, 2003 11:32:56 -0300 "Marc G. Fournier" 
<scrappy at hub.org> wrote:

>
> I've yet to be able to come up with a sieve rule that will allow me to
> filter all "garbage" subjects to a seperate folder ... you know the ones
> that look like:
>
> Subject: =?euc-kr?q?(=B1=A4=B0=ED)=B5=F0=C1=F6=
>
> I've even tried to use Pine filtering to filter based on 8bit subjects,
> but it doesn't pick them up either ...
>
> For instance, under Pine, if I try to select all subjects with =B1= in
> them, which the above contains, it selects nothing, so I'm figuring there
> has to be some control characters in there somewhere ... ?

As another poster noted, these are not 'garbage'; they just have a
non-default character set specified.  Since they look like garbage
to you; you are obviously not using a MUA that can handle that charset
(or possibly can't handle the charset identifiers at all); so filtering
them as a personal choice is reasonable.

The charset identifier is the bit at the beginning that starts with '=?'
and runs through the next question mark.  I haven't tried filtering that
in sieve; I don't know if it's automatic conversion effectively hides the
charset identifier.  But I do have an Exim ACL rule to reject a couple of
asian charsets on a domain where I know that nobody can read them.  (Gets
rid of a lot of apparent spam.)  Filtering for '=?euc-kr?' and a small
number of similar values ('=?big5?', '=?gb2312', etc.) should get rid
of them.



-Pat