Filter first word in subject

[Doug Starkey]

My anti-spam firewall allows me to tag suspicious e-mails by adding a
keyword to the beginning of the e-mail header. Most of my other e-mail
clients will let me set up a filter to look at the first word in the
subject line an properly filter the e-mail to a "SPAM" folder.

Outlook (Microsoft Office Outlook 2003), however, appears to only allow
me to detect the presence of the key word, not whether the key word is
at the beginning (or end) of the subject. Is there something I'm
missing? Is it possible to have Outlook filters detect that the "subject
BEGINS with XXXX"?

Thanks for the help.

 

[Ben M. Schorr - MVP]

My anti-spam firewall allows me to tag suspicious e-mails by adding a
keyword to the beginning of the e-mail header. Most of my other e-mail
clients will let me set up a filter to look at the first word in the
subject line an properly filter the e-mail to a "SPAM" folder.

Outlook (Microsoft Office Outlook 2003), however, appears to only allow
me to detect the presence of the key word, not whether the key word is
at the beginning (or end) of the subject. Is there something I'm
missing? Is it possible to have Outlook filters detect that the "subject
BEGINS with XXXX"?

Thanks for the help.

Do you get a lot of legit mail with SPAM in the subject?

That said, if your anti-spam firewall lets you specify the keyword why not
make it something unique like "**SPAM**" or "THIS BE JUNK" then you can
filter on that.

 

[Brian Tillman]

My anti-spam firewall allows me to tag suspicious e-mails by adding a
keyword to the beginning of the e-mail header. Most of my other e-mail
clients will let me set up a filter to look at the first word in the
subject line an properly filter the e-mail to a "SPAM" folder.

Outlook (Microsoft Office Outlook 2003), however, appears to only
allow me to detect the presence of the key word, not whether the key
word is at the beginning (or end) of the subject.

This is correct. There is no option to detect the position of a string
within the subject. IN fact, there's no way to have a rule distinguish
between a string that has delimiters on either side and one that is embedded
within another string. For example, having a rule detect the string "rule"
will match on the string "ferrule" and "ruler" as well.