Spam Filter Keyword Blacklist

Filter through your spam with these keywords to easily remove spam

Filtering spam, who would have thunk it?

Like me, you probably get a great deal of spam. Also like me, you probably feel the need to review the spam to make sure none of the real emails you are supposed to receive get filtered as spam. The problem with that is that you spend precious minutes of your day checking through tens or hundreds of emails that are not from real contacts and frequently contain malicious content, when you could have used that time eating pizza and watching Jon Stewart.

Running a filter of emails already marked as spam saves you time by deleting emails that you would always recognize as spam. Spam keyword blacklists also let you create much stronger filters than you normally would be able to create for your inbox folder. The purpose of this page is to provide you an ever-expanding list of keywords to filter and blacklist from your spam folder. These filters are meant to be used to scan the spam folder and will automatically delete most of your malicious spam. Come back at least once per month to update your list of keyword filters.

Once a spammer has your email address, your email address will be available to spammers forever. We all know that. That sucks, but C'est la vie, such is life. However, there are ways to reduce the spread your email address. This article gives you one method to help you out. For more tips, see question 6 in this FAQ.

I use these blacklist filters in Gmail. If you want to use these blacklists, I highly recommend forwarding all your email to Gmail. Gmail is extremely efficient at filtering spam, and there is no email program out there that does the job of autofiltering and manual filtering as well as Gmail does. If you choose not to use these filters with Gmail, you then need to modify them to fit your own email program.

Deleted emails are protected. In Gmail, when an email gets deleted, it gets sent to your Trash folder for a period of thirty days. That means that you do not have to worry about important emails getting deleted from your spam folder without your getting the chance to inspect them.

Step by step instructions on how to use these filters in Gmail:

1. Open up your Gmail account. Click on Settings in the top right corner, and then click on Filters. Scroll down to the bottom and click on Create a new filter.
2. Right click the text in Filter 1, and click copy. Then paste that text into the Has the words box in your Gmail filter.
3. Look through the keywords and delete any that you do not want to include. Add any keywords you want to avoid into the Doesn't have section. Separate new keywords with the capital word OR or with the | (pipe) symbol.
4. Click Next Step ». You should get the following warning:
   Filter searches containing "label:", "in:", "is:", or stars criteria (i.e. "has:yellow-star") are not recommended as they will never match incoming mail.
   
   Do you still wish to continue to the next step?
   If you got the warning, click "OK". Otherwise, click « Back.
5. Check the Delete it checkbox and the Also apply filter to __ conversations below checkbox. (Emails will be saved in your Trash folder for 30 days, after which they will be permanently deleted.) Click Create Filter
6. Repeat this procedure with Filter 2, and so on.

FAQ:

1. Why do the percentage of emails deleted by your filter blacklists go up and down?

   Although the percentage of spam emails deleted goes up in general, random statistical fluctuations make the percentage of emails deleted fluctuate. The fluctuations do not mean that the filters of spam are more or less effective.

2. Why have your percentages plateaued at between 75% and 85%?

   This is actually a perceived due to the way percents work. Above 70%, Each 1% percent increase of spam autodeted corresponds to between a 7% and 10% improvement in spam filtering. An improvement from 75% to 85% of spam autodeleted corresponds to approximately a 67% improvement.

3. Why do you occasionally have brand names in your blacklist?

   Second, if a branded company does not satisfactorially unsubsribed a user from their email lists after multiple attempts, their emails can be marked as unsolicited commercial email.

4. Why are some of the words in your spam filters totally random and nonsensical?

   Some of the spam you and I get contains absolute nonsense and appears to contain no special keywords that are blacklistable. In order to be vigilant against the spam, addressmunger.com insists on blacklisting at least one word or phrase in every spam email. This serves a secondary purpose of helping us discover keywords that may not seem valuable for a blacklist that turn out to be very powerful.

5. Why do your keywords occasionally occur in more than one filters?

   In one of the steps of the filtering process, I recommend that you add keywords into the "Doesn't have" section of the filter. I do this very carefully. This causes me to occasionally repeat a keyword.

6. What should I do if I have a keyword list I that would like to recommend to you?

   Email us.

Disclaimer: Follow each step extremely carefully. It is your responsibility to manage your own spam. It is up to you to determine appropriate filters and inspect your Trash folder to make sure the filter works properly. AddressMunger.com accepts no responsibility in errors, temporary deletions, or permanent deletions caused by the use of this guide. Addressmunger.com is not responsible for the way you use the information on this website.

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