Around the beginning of 2006, I had posted about a planned upcoming feature called “Ask BeOSNews.” In a nutshell, the idea is this: readers EMail us with BeOS-related questions/problems, and we post answers/solutions that incorporate input from readers and community members. Somewhat a combination of two of the best BeOS tech help resources, comp.sys.be.help and BeTips.

I’ve decided to start the feature in a self-indulgent fashion and ask for help with a odd problem I’ve been having with the Mail Daemon Replacement and spam filtering. Read on for the details and if you’re feeling helpful, please post your suggestions in the comments area.

For the last few years, I’ve used the BeMail Replacement Daemon for pretty much all my personal and work EMail. It’s a great piece of software and the only bad thing I can say about is that, after using MDR, my blood is even more likely to boil every time I have to support Outlook (if I ever meet the person who implemented the “Use Word to edit signature” feature…). And on top of MDR’s tangible benefits, there’s also the plus that it’s developed by a group of crafty lobsters (why not?).

Lately, however, I’ve been having a strange problem with filtering in MDR. Server-side spam filtering is done for most of the mail accounts I have, with the server appending “[Spam]” to the subject line of suspected junk mail. In an effort to keep my inbox a little more sane, I setup filters in MDR to do the following:

– for messages where the “Subject” is [Spam]* mark as read
– for messages where the “Subject” is [Spam]* move to folder “/boot/home/mail/spammity spam”

This didn’t seem to work, however – while some messages with [Spam] in the subject were marked read and moved, the majority still ended up in my inbox. So I changed the filter use use *[Spam]* instead – that seemed to catch the [Spam] messages, but it also filtered messages with subject lines free of canned meat products.

If anyone knows of solutions I can try to get those filters working, I would be eternally grateful if you posted in this article’s comments. I’ll collect whatever suggestions are made and (hopefully) post the solution in the near future, so the information will be easily-available to anyone else who runs into the same issue.

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