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Why do messages get rejected for having restricted content, when no restricted words occur in the message?

Question

Some messages are blocked by my GMS Anti-Spam restricted word filter, even though these words do not appear in the email body. Why is this?

Answer

When an email is sent, it is usually MIME encoded.

When this happens, any attachments will be encoded into a MIME section which contains a long string of text, which will look something like this:

--=====================_1026219951==_
Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name="file.zip"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="file.zip"
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Very often, contained within this text will be sequences of characters which form words. If these words appear within your restricted word file, then this message will be blocked.

To avoid this happening, you should enter your restricted words with spaces to either side of them. This will prevent them being matched against strings of characters within encoded MIME sections of messages.

See Also:

Keywords:Restricted words, RWords, restricted, content filter

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