Blocking Russian/Chinese SPAM

Blocking Russian and Chinese SPAM is actually fairly easy.  Unless you communicate in Russian or Chinese, just delete any e-mail that contains any of the special characters either of those languages use.  I’ll admit that Chinese is a bit harder, since there are over 3000 characters in their ‘alphabet’, but using the top 30 or 40 characters should block most of the SPAM.

UPDATE:

Outlook 2007 has an option to block all non-English character encodings. Here’s how you block everything but e-mail using the English character set:

1. Launch Outlook 2007
2. Open the Tools menu
3. Select Options
4. Click the Preferences tab
5. Click the Junk e-mail button
6. Click the International tab
7. Click Blocked Encodings List button
8. Click the Select All button
9. This is a list to block unused encodings, so you must UNSELECT the encodings you will be using. For most English speakers, the options to unselect would be
   • US-ASCII
   • Western European
   • Latin 9
10. Click OK, OK, OK

Blocking Russian or Chinese SPAM in Outlook

1. Open Outlook
2. Click Tools
3. Click Rules and Alerts
   

   Outlook Tools, Rules and Alerts

4. Click the New Rule button
   

   Outlook Rules > New Rules

5. In the New Rule Dialog box, select Move messages with specific words in the subject…
   

   Outlook New Rule

6. Click the Specific Words link in the ‘Edit the rule description’ field
   

   Outlook Rules Add Words and Phrases

7. Open Patrick Zein’s page of most common Chinese characters. Cut and paste each of the first 30 or so characters, one at a time, into the Specify words or phrases.. field, then click the Add button after each character.
8. Click OK
9. Click the Specified link and specify the Deleted Items folder
   

   Specify "Deleted Items" Folder

10. Click OK

You can also block the Cyrillic (Russian) characters using the same steps as above.

Summary

So if you get mail that uses non-English character sets, just create Outlook rules that will block the character set used by the language. If you have Outlook 2007 or later, you can block by character set using the Junk Mail options.