Annoying Russian Spam and How I Finally Got it to Stop Bothering Me

Maybe it's just me, or maybe others have experienced the same problem, but in the past month or so I have seen a huge spike in spam emails that are totally in Cyrillic characters (I assume they are Russian, but don't know for sure).

I have been struggling with how to get these to go automatically to my Junk mail folder. They come from a variety of sources and the text is not identical, but they are completely devoid of Roman characters (like the ones you are reading now). It turns out that MS Outlook will not let you set up an email rule that sorts by the script of the email. You can't throw away email based on the inclusion of Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese, or any other writing system.

My fix was to pick out one common Cyrillic character, д, and set up a rule that tossed any email containing it as a word fragment. There is a potential drawback here, of course, which is that if anyone sends a legitimate email I want to receive, but they include a д for some reason, it will still go to the Junk folder, even if the rest of the letter is in English. I am willing to live with that risk.

This morning's Junk folder shows 9 of the 16 items accumulated since last night are Russian spam, so it seems like a reasonable and useful fix.