Get rid of Russian junk from my Gmail

Question

The spam folder in my Gmail everyday gets simply flooded with Russian-written junk e-mails.

How can I get rid of it? Is there any filter in Gmail that targets specific language, alphabet (Cyrylic) or maybe specific sender's domain (.ru and .su)?

Answer 1

You could create a filter, if you can find a search that will hit only the emails you want, and have all matching messages deleted? Or at least "never send to spam" but instead moved to a special folder if you want to review them too.

I thought that maybe some characters that never show up in your language like ф peraps? But apparently Gmail doesn't search like that, here's a good overview from another answer:

The Gmail search functionality works based on what I would describe as tokens. A token is any sequence of alphanumeric characters separated by a space or by other non-alphanumeric characters such as underscore, full stop (period), "@", dash, etc.. So in [email protected] there are 4 tokens: "peter", "ford23", "example" and "com".

Wildcards within tokens do not work.

So Gmail only searches by words or parts of emails. Even the . in the examples below may be unnecessary (from:.ru may be the same as from:ru)

Or something like from:.ru should match all messages whose from address contains .ru (I tested from:(.com) that matches anything.com addresses, while from:(.co) matches emails containing .co like @yahoo.co.uk.

There may be a combination of "tokens"/words in the from:, subject:,body: that might match enough messages...

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There used to be a good language search, but apparently it doesn't work anymore. This guy said that Gmail could search emails by language using lang:[code], like lang:ru for Russian. More language codes should be here. I don't think I have any emails like that so couldn't test, but trying lang:en didn't show any hits, so it looks like it's no longer available.

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Or, you could try a filter for the "false positive" spam you frequently see and keep those out of the spam folder, maybe search for your name or something unique? That would probably result in a lot of spam not in the spam folder though.

Answer 2

A working solution for me to get rid of all the Russian calendar invitations was to filter to the top 50 Russian words and tick "Has attachment". You can test the results if you paste this to the Gmail serach box:

("и"|"в"|"не"|"он"|"на"|"я"|"что"|"тот"|"быть"|"с"|"а"|"весь"|"это"|"как"|"она"|"по"|"но"|"они"|"к"|"у"|"ты"|"из"|"мы"|"за"|"вы"|"так"|"же"|"от"|"сказать"|"этот"|"который"|"мочь"|"человек"|"о"|"один"|"ещё"|"бы"|"такой"|"только"|"себя"|"своё"|"какой"|"когда"|"уже"|"для"|"вот"|"кто"|"да"|"говорить"|"год")

or you can add and has:attachment to it to get only ones with an attachment

Note that you must put the Russian words between quotes or else gmail will also find the words translated to English. Weird.

Answer 3

Since I don't expect emails with Cyrillic characters, I just add this line to other filters that would focus on likely spam. This represents all the Cyrillic characters in the Russian language.

{а б в г д е ж з и й к л м н о п р с т у ф х ц ч ш щ ъ ы ь э ю я}

I also apply a label "Auto Deleted" so that if in case I'll need to manually check, it would be easy to find those mails hit with this filter. You have 30 days before those auto-deleted messages are cleaned out by Gmail.

Answer 4

In Gmail search for the following:

in:spam д|ж|и

Add other Cyrillic only letters as you desire to get the results you need.

-- edit -- Whilst I understand that this answer doesn't work for all, in my testing using Chrome on Windows 10, I do get results.