I have quite a few key-word filters on my GMail (I'm tired of all the penis-enlargement offers, although I would like to know how they found out that mine was too small!) and would like to filter out any messages that contain a percent sign in the Subject field. Apparently % is a wild card character, because if I test a filter with that as a parameter it finds EVERY email in my system. Is there an escape character for the percent sign?

tanstaafl.

Try %% and \%. I don't know that either will work.

Google's spam filter lets penis enlargement emails into your inbox? That makes me wonder what your normal email traffic looks like.

Have you ever bothered marking the unwanted stuff as SPAM?

Yeah the gmail spam filters work great for me. I get one in the inbox maybe once a month but I just looked at the spam folder and it look like I get about 40 in there a day. I almost never look at the spam folder but I have never found a real email in there that got mistaken for spam.

No. All these ads are already going into the Spam box. I want to preempt even that much intrusion and have them deleted before they even reach my mailbox.

Google's spam filter works quite well -- I probably average one or two spam mails a month that actually make it into my inbox.

tanstaafl.

I'd say everything that reaches a filter has reached your mailbox, but I get what you're saying.

So I gather you're the type who checks the spam box for false positives? There's nothing wrong with that, and I know a lot of people do it. I tend to trust the GMail filters, never even look in the spam folder, and have the spam folder hidden under the "XX more" drop-down. I even have an extension in Firefox that, among other things, hides the count on the spam label.

The reason I've never bothered to do what you're trying to do is because of an annoyance in GMail search. For some reason that they don't explain, you can't do a partial word search in GMail like you can in the rest of Google. I find this extremely annoying. If I look at the spam mail I get, a good half of it has the word "viagra" in it, but it's always bunched up next to another word. I can't use something like "viagra*" to search for it. And these messages aren't even using cyrillic or something to try to get pass the filters.

Nope.

But on reflection, it was a bad idea to begin with because gmail doesn't let me differentiate between the subject and the body when setting up the filters, so not only would it filter out the Subject "80% off Pfizer...", but it would filter out any valid emails that might mention a percentage in the text of the message.

tanstaafl.

It sounds like you're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Don't you have a lake nearby that needs its fish population reduced some?

You need to drop GMail if you want to have any decent filtering. Then set up your own mailbox on a server you control and you can get as creative as you want with rules.

tanstaafl.

You must have one hell of a casting arm to hit the lake from your dock.

I think that says "deck".

here's my new view:


Aye mate! That thar be the Caribbean.

At 1920 on a 17" screen, I'm lucky I could even make out the word started with a "d"

Then I guess you probably couldn't tell that it was a Mercury outboard on that fishing boat...

tanstaafl.

Looks like a nice place as far as I can tell from the pic. Plenty of greenery throughout the streets which is something I like.

How much annual rainfall do you get there, and what time of year does it occur?

Read it and weep!

tanstaafl.

So, summer rainfall (thunderstorms?) and consistently mild temperatures.

Nice.

Our summer minimum temperatures (overnight) are equivalent to your summer daytime maximum temperatures.

Glorious electrical displays!

tanstaafl.

It's actually quite readable if you rmb>view image

I really dislike the way the board handles attachments now, particularly images. Tom, is there at least a way to get it to display those images larger? I have a 30" screen here, and these images are tiny until you load them into a new tab.

I suppose this method is to keep from getting those format-busting large images, and that's fine, but the default scale size seems to be set to 400, which is just too small.

If you would like to send me a 30 inch monitor, then sure, I'll look into it :-)

I'll see what can be changed, as it's been bothering me a bit as well. Inline, I doubt I'll increase the size much. But a link to see it full size would be nice.

Right-Click ---> View Image shows them full-size for me here. Not quite as convenient as how, say, dpreview forums manages it though.

Cheers