First let me say that I realize that filtering is supposedly better done at the MTA level (and we are running spam assassin), but I don't have access to that level; I am only a moderator for several lists, and I would like to be able to do simple filtering without bothering the sys admin.

With discard_these_nonmembers, I use regular expressions such as: ^.*paypal\.com ^debora.* Those seem to work fine.

But I would like to be able to filter on subject lines, and suppose this would be done with header_filter_rules. About half of the spam that gets through are those recent ubiquitous spams with subject lines like "Linda wrote:" and "hi it's Linda". I tried the rules: ^subject:.*hi\sit ^subject:.*wrote: But they don't seem to work. I am not very familiar with regular expressions. Can someone point out something I am doing wrong?