Pegasus Mail & Mercury

A technique used by a fair proportion of spammers to push their mail up peoples in boxes is the use of future dates.   I can see no reason to process any mail with is dated more than 24 hours in the future as it must be either junk or from someone who is pretty incompetent.   Would it be possible to add a filtering rule or  Compliance tick box to handle mail that had future dates, perhaps we should use more that the theoretical maximum dateline error of 24 hours just in case.

In or case this would avoid delivering quite a lot of spam to users mail boxes for their clients to filter.   I do not think we ever get such mails that Popefile and Spamhalter  do not detect so this would just be a tool to automatically dispose of mail that must be rubbish.

Hello!

There are two filtering options to check the date or the age of a message. Such a rule may be useful even to find a future date.

Some time ago, I tried hwo to set up such a rule. If I recall correctly, I created a filtering rule based on the message date and entered negative values for the "Between"-settings (you can find that in the "Edit a rule based on the message date"-window).
"Between [-2] and [-3650] days old" may help you filter out the suspicious messages. The date specified in a message has to be more than two days later than today in order to make the rule trigger, and the rule catches all messages whose date is set anywhere in the next ten years.

As far as I remember, negative values in a filtering rule based on the message age did not work.

As I said, I am recalling what I tried some years ago. I am not sure whether this still works the same way in the current version, nor do I know whether my weak brain really helps me here. *g* However, I hope the main point is obvious: negative values in a Message date rule. Just try it.

EDIT: When writing my post, I was not aware of the forum the original question was posted in. I answered the question with Pegasus Mail in mind; however, the original question was asked in the Mercury forum. As I do not use Mercury, I am not sure whether there are similar filtering rules as described above for Pegasus Mail. I am sorry if this causes any confusion. If there IS a similar rule for Mercury, you may want to try that.

That is indeed what I was thinking of doing BUT the message age filtering rule does not appear to be in Mercury.  

 I might well test it in my local copy of Pegasus though to see if it works, I suspect that it will not but nothing ventured...
 

In fact using -1 as the age of a message DOES detect future dated emails in Pegasus so a similar feature in Mercury would be very useful.  

 Having said that the popularity of future dating by spammers seems to be on the wane a bit.