Filters identify any email that meet certain criteria, for example, you may want to identify all email that have the words Dear Friend in the body of the email, or all email that have a Microsoft Word attachment.
To identify all email with "Dear Friend" in the body of the email:
To identify all email with a Microsoft Word attachment (.doc):
Yes! With special thanks to Gary Partain, here's a link to a big list of filters. Just download it and add it into your filters list!
Download user-supplied filters.
RegExpr means regular expression. Regular expressions are tools that look like comic-book expletives (#!?#@!!#), but can be very powerful when used to filter email.
Regular expressions are used to recognize patterns within emails. They evaluate the text of an email and return an answer of true or false. That is, either the expression correctly describes the text of the email or it doesn't. This enables you to specify a filter to easily identify certain kinds of email text or patterns.
Regular expression filters take a bit of getting used to, but here is a basic outline and some more common examples below that you may like to use yourself.
| Character | What it represents | Example | |
| Any | Represents the character typed, with the exception of special characters defined below |
A represents A, B represents B etc | |
| . | Any character(except line breaks) | Will match c, 3, [SPACE] etc | |
| \d | Any digit | Will match 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9 | |
| \D | Any non-digit | Will match anything except 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9 | |
| ^ | Beginning of line | ||
| $ | End of line | ||
| \t | [TAB] | \thello matches "hello" preceded by a tab | |
| \r | Line Break [RETURN] | ||
| \s | Whitespace | Matches any whitespace character: [SPACE], [TAB], Line Break, New Line | |
| \S | Non whitespace | Matches any non whitespace character | |
| \w | Word characters | Typically letters, numbers and underscores | |
| \W | Non word characters | Matches any non word character | |
| \character | A character that is normally a special character | Special characters are: . # ^ $ \ ? + * | [ ] ( ) | |
| [any series of characters] | Any characters inside the brackets | [abc] matches a, b or c | |
| [any character - another character] | Any characters within the range of characters | [a-c] matches a, b or c | |
| [^ any series of characters] | Any character except ones after the ^ | [^c3] matches any character except c or 3 | |
| ? | 0 or 1 of the previous character | ba?t matches bat or bt, but not boat | |
| * | 0 or more of the previous character | ba*t matches bt, bat, baat etc | |
| + | 1 or more of the previous character | ba+t matches bat, baat etc but not bt | |
| pattern1/pattern2 | Either of the patterns specified | ba|t matches ba or t but not bat (it will match ba and then t for two matches instead of one) | |
| (pattern)one of the special characters | Same as above, but treats the characters in the parenthesis as a group | (ba)*t match t, bat, babat but not bt | |
The online help for the regular expression engine that MailWasher Pro uses can be found here.
You would use: The Subject field "does not contain RegExpr", and then place a full stop . in the next box.
Remember, the full stop . means any character, so we are making a rule that the subject line does not contain any character, meaning a blank subject line.
^buy matches "buy" only if it's at the beginning of a sentence.
buy$ matches "buy" only if it's at the end of a line.
^buy$ matches "buy" if it's the only word in the line.
More details of regular expressions can be found here.
There are also other guides available on the web.
Probably not. MailWasher Pro has its filters in a text file in the application data directory (which can be located by selecting About in the Help menu and selecting the link). You will probably have to add your own filter in.
Filters appear on the Status column and are activated when an email is intercepted which has triggered your filter.
People in the Friends List would not normally be subject to filters, but if you have set up a filter to specifically catch a particular virus, then you can set the filter to take precedence (or identify the virus) over anyone in your Friends List.
Right click on your MailWasher Pro shortcut > with the left mouse button select Properties > select the Compatibility tab at the top > ensure the option "Run as administrator" is checked > click OK.