Poco Junk Mail FAQ - Junk mail filtering and styled messages

Over the past couple of days I've noticed a change in some of the junk mail I've been receiving. These new messages contain virtually no text in the body that you can use to filter on. They rely on external images to display the details of the message and these images are also links to a website. Poco doesn't display these pages unless you have the "download external images" setting turned on.

While I've seen this type of message before they weren't frequent enough to cause me any concern but the past few got me to thinking of how to catch them using Poco's junk mail filtering options. The good news is that I've found a solution:

  1. Put your mouse over the image (do not click), look in the status line and see the URL listed.
  2. Add this url (or a portion thereof) to the "junkbody.txt" file. (Ctrl+F7 to open the "Junk Mail Filtering" window, press the "Word Lists" button and then the "Message Body" button).
  3. Enter a sufficiently high score to indicate messages containing this URL should be considered spam.

This works provided the images are linked to html pages that the spammer intends you to click on.