Blocking Chinese Spam from gmail

Since May I’ve been getting a crazy amount of Chinese spam. About 40 messages a day. Although I would one day love to learn Chinese and find out how impressive I will be to my lover after taking their herbal viagra, right now I’m just trying to get my work done.

There are several articles out there claiming that:

lang:zh

can be used as a filter. I think this is old news as it doesn’t seem to work anymore for any language.

So I googled the most common Chinese characters and put together a filter like this:

的 OR 是 OR 否 OR 要 OR 不

This catches them all nicely. Sorry Chinese spammers.

Jacob Singh
CTO in residence at Sequoia Capital. Independent product and Engineering Coach Mediocre guitarist, singer, rock climber, point guard and baker Dedicated dad. American in New Delhi.
New Delhi