Image Spam Then, Now PDF Spam

Months ago I noticed a surge in spammers sending me images with legit looking words in email body to defeat anti-spam tools.

Now, there's a plenty of them spam, this time as PDF files, received by my inbox. Most of the filenames even have my name on them as if it's really for me.

Since I know they're spam, I just mark them as spam until my email client or webmail tags messages like it as junk mail.

Creating Spam Filters in Gmail

I got irritated with the increasing number of spam messages sent to my gmail address incidentally where I use to moderate various Yahoo! Groups

Spammers found a way to send email to group owners by sending tons of spam to addresses in this format: groupname-owner@yahoogroups.com

Yahoo's SpamGuard tags those spam messages correctly but alway get past Gmail's Junk Mail filters so I decided to create a filter to automagically delete those annoying junk mails

Note those messages tagged by SpamGuard has the following heading with them:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yahoo! Groups SpamGuard has detected that the attached message to the
owner of the Yahoo! Group is likely to be spam.
For more information about SpamGuard, please visit our help pages:
http://groups.yahoo.com/local/spamguard.html
------------------------------------------------------------------------

All we have to do is create a Gmail filter that looks for the first few words of the SpamGuard message then delete any message that matches the criteria.

Here's how:

Login to your gmail account
Click the Create a filter link shown below


Copy part of the message that always comes with spam then paste into the Has the words form field (here I pasted these words "Yahoo! Groups SpamGuard has detected that the attached message to the owner of the Yahoo! Group")
Click Next Step button
Click Delete it checkbox
Click Create Filter button


Note with SpamGuard is that it's not perfect so sometimes you may catch and delete a legitimate message :(