Make Outlook attachment filenames searchable with rules

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
  • Start date Start date
G

Guest

You can make rules to search sender names and message body content but you
can't search by filename.

I'm currently being spammed with emails in which the attachment contains the
word "pills...medication" etc but I cannot filter them out because there is
no rules mechanism to do so.

I think there should be a rules option for "with specific words in the
attachment name"
 
RodP42 said:
I'm currently being spammed with emails in which the attachment
contains the word "pills...medication" etc but I cannot filter them
out because there is no rules mechanism to do so.
Click to expand...

Do you mean what you say (i.e., the attachment contains the word "pills",
"medication", etc.) or do you mean the names of the attachments contain
those words? If the former, you should be able to filter on "specific words
in the body of the message". Since the attachment is part of the body, you
should be able to search on its contents.

If you mean that you want to filter based on the attachment's name, then
you're correct, Outlook doesn't have a rule clause allowing that. However,
http://www.outlookcode.com/ may have something.
http://www.outlookcode.com/d/code/quarexe.htm might be a good place to
start.
 
Someone "harvested" my email address and is now sending out emails for the
the usual medical spam stuff using my email address as the "from" portion.
Consequently, I am now receiving over 250 emails a day as they bounce off
various mail servers. The body of the original spam email is often returned
as an attachment and the filename is usually the subject line text., and
hence I need a way to screen for specified words in attachments.

Rod
 
RodP42 said:
Someone "harvested" my email address and is now sending out emails
for the the usual medical spam stuff using my email address as the
"from" portion. Consequently, I am now receiving over 250 emails a
day as they bounce off various mail servers. The body of the original
spam email is often returned as an attachment and the filename is
usually the subject line text., and hence I need a way to screen for
specified words in attachments.
Click to expand...

As I said, a rule that looks for specific words in the body of the message
should find those words in the attachment, if they are in that attachment
(unless the attchment is HTML; I find Outlook doesn't scan HTML well). You
could also use a rule that rejects the messages based on the subject
contents.
 
Hi Brian,

This doesn't seem to work in Outlook 2000. I filtered a folder, looking for
some words that are contained in a file attached as a Word document (the word
is in the file, not in the file name). The result "filters out" all items,
including the one with the words in the attachment. I have also used the
"Find" function and saw similar behavior: you can find words in Outlook
fields, or do a separate search (choose "look for" files) to seach the
contents of files in a drive directory, but not in the text of files attached
to messages, at least not without a plug-in. Was this function added in newer
releases of Outlook?
 
Greg Bury said:
This doesn't seem to work in Outlook 2000. I filtered a folder,
looking for some words that are contained in a file attached as a
Word document (the word is in the file, not in the file name).
Click to expand...

Since the attachment is a Word document and, hence, binary, there's no
guarantee that what you see as a character string when you use Word to read
the attachment is an unbroken string in the file, since Word documents
contain formatting information that can be embedded in the middle of the
string, thus making it unrecognizable to Outlook's search function. I don't
think that has improved since Outlook 2000. I, for one, don't have a good
solution, other than to suggest an anti-spam tool like SpamBayes.
 
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