Why won't Gmail add filtering based on character sets?

We love our Gmail. Members of our staff have converted legions of email users to Gmail, we've posted tips and tricks on how to get the most out of your Gmail account, and we've genuflected towards Mountain View three times daily. So what gives with all the Cyrillic and Big5 encoded messages that slip past the spam filters?

We know billions of people speak languages which use these character encodings but, the problem is, most of us don't speak any language which uses a non-western character set. Why can't Gmail offer us the chance to filter out messages we can't read?

Cyrillic messages, like the one pictured above, always contain charset="Windows-1251" in their headers but, Gmail lacks the ability to allow you to create filters based on header information. Gmail's spam filtering -- which for the most part works flawlessly -- often fails to catch non-english messages and the end result for a highly active Gmail user; Lots of obvious non-english spam slips through the cracks.

We love you Gmail. We just wish that you'd address this tiny character flaw so we can love you all the more.

Tags: gmail, spam filters, SpamFilters