Desired feature of the day:

[jducoeur]

A language flag for Gmail, that says, "Just mark everything in any Asian language as spam". My new crossert.com domain (which I'll be using for my consulting work) is immediately getting hit by a bunch of spam, all of it apparently in Korean.

Really, it would be a fine first-level filter. I don't believe I've ever received a single legitimate email that contained more than a few characters in any Asian language (none of which I read), and lots of spam that did, so as spam-filters go, it would be fine bang for the buck...

Comments

[eclecticmagpie.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I get a ton of foreign language spam, but only on one account -- the one I use for my tea dances. It was listed in plaintext on a folkdance directory and on the website of the church where the dances are held. My other accounts don't get this stuff in this kind of quantity. Who have you given your new address to?

[jducoeur]

Essentially nobody, which is why I was surprised by it. The only person who knows about it is my first client, and I think it unlikely that he would have passed it around, especially so quickly.

My best guess is that somebody was scanning for new domains, and started hitting me as soon as it got registered. Annnnd now that you mention it -- yes, I neglected to check the little ticky-box of "keep my email address out of the WHOIS database". Now fixed, but I'll bet that's what caused it...

[dkapell.livejournal.com]

before we swapped over to Google Apps for domains, knobhdy had this same issue with russian and japanese spam, which she solved by snagging the most common characters, and adding them to a filter which dumped them directly in the spam folder. It would be like filtering everything that contains an 'e' over to spam, it worked really nicely.

[leanne-opaskar.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't work for me. (: I have a subscription to the Japan Times online edition. (;

But as a flag, yes, that'd be useful for other people, I'm sure.

[meranthi.livejournal.com]

Well, most filters will allow you to set "Not this address" so it should still work. :)

[be-well-lowell.livejournal.com]

Spamassassin more or less does this for me. Bayesian filters tend to match undesired languages pretty quickly, too.