denn988, thank you very much for the filter. That is exactly what I wanted!
I too have tested it for a day now, and like you about the second thing I did was to remove the [!/] to see if I would get more hits.
I did get more hits but unfortunately I also got one bad hit, so I put the [!/] back in. I have had no bad hits with that whatsoever.
I'm currently trying to figure out if there is any other way to catch the non-comment garbage.

I've also got a new problem because i'm getting a lot more non-sex spam lately which doesn't contain much in the way of words you'd like filtered. Need to think about what to do about those.

Plus, I'm getting spam where the letters from the visible spam comes in raw as a string of numbers like #233 and so on, and only the whited out text is normal in raw.

I already have the two versions set up like you say. (i put the second filter back when you suggested it)
I'm running both of them to override friends list and they are the two top filters.

But i can not see how the first filter does anything the second filter won't do. I'm rather sceptical to the second filter and would like something more precise, just like the first one.
If the first filter keeps working perfectly for an extended period of time I will switch it to auto. I won't do it right away.

I will think about combining the second filter with something else.
My hope of learning regex shrinks every time I try. The commands list in the help files seems to be incomplete, and I don't quite understand the examples either.

Here's an example of numbers for letters:

----------------------------------
<html?<br><font color=white>Viziertoaskhisson,whoownedthetruth,addingthat,dearlyALCIBIADES: You did.DICAEOPOLIS</font><font color=black><br>
Unleash The Power<font color=white>that have responded.</font><font color=black><br>
Of Your Digital Cable <font color=white>she always did, At night she would not come if it was dark, for she</font><font color=black><br>
-----------------------------------------

And so on...

Damn numbers come out as text whatever I do.
How do I post the code so you can see it?

Pretty bogus but this works, add a space after every & sign.

& #115;& #097;& #108;& #101;& #115;& #064;& #115;& #116;& #097;& #110;& #109;& #105;& #108;& #108;& #101;& #114;& #046;& #105;& #110;& #102;& #111;

same thing with no spaces:

sales@stanmiller.info

The filter should also look for the code with 2 digits instead of 3. I don't know if 1 digit is possible. Don't think so.
I'm trying these out now. No bad hits on startup.

The bad hit mail you ask for is unfortunately gone. I didn't think to save it and hotmail deleted it for me.
I looked it through first, and it looked like normal html to me, although I could not find what caused the hit. Should have looked harder.
I think the message had a yahoo groups sponsor message at the bottom but I'm not sure that did it. I haven't had any other hits from yahoo groups or that particular sender.

I've been reading this thread with delight. The only thing I want to add is that Gary's "HTML Spam Tricks" and "Questionable Links" filters deal with some of the issues that you're discussing.

The whole set filters can be downloaded at:

www.w5hq.com/MailWasher/MailWasherFilters.txt

I consider Gary's stuff to be the baseline to which I've added and subtracted based on other factors. For a while I resisted the regex allure because I run POPFile with great success. I subsequently turned off blacklisting and no longer use a friends list. I even disabled all of Gary's filters for a while.

But even POPFile gets the rare false positive so now I justify the regex effort as a means of reducing false positives. I don't clutter up my display with anything that a) passes all other than the POPFile "good" email filters or b) gets hit by any regex filter that has never had a false positive.

But to be perfectly honest, the rare false positive isn't a show stopper for me. In reality, improving the regex filters I run has become a bit of fun time for me .... something I now do instead of doing a crossword puzzle or playing a game of Solitare on my computer.

And it's all Denn988's fault for egging me on!

BTW, in another topic, Denn988 alluded to problems with Gary's filters but he hasn't spilled the beans ... yet!

I just recieved a mail (spam actually) , that triggered the [a-z]<[^<]*?>[a-z] filter by a linebreak < br> between two words, that had no space between them.
Is there a way to prevent this? Seems like a possible source of bad hits.