Apple Mail, filtering spam when sender appears to be myself

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Apple Mail, filtering spam when sender appears to be myself

I've recently received emails where the sender is supposedly myself! It appears to be from my name, at my email address. When I view Raw Source in Apple Mail I see things like:

From: Harbor Freight <[me@mydomain.com]>

X-Info: Message sent by sailthru.com customer theSkimm, Inc

X-Info: We do not permit unsolicited commercial email

X-Info: Please report abuse by forwarding complete headers to

X-Info: abuse@sailthru.com

X-Mailer: sailthru.com

X-JMailer: nj1-farmelon.flt

I could click on the "Unsubscribe" button, but I'm hesitant to since they sneakily used my name and address as the sender, and I don't want to confirm to them that I read their emails.

Is there any way I can set up a rule in Apple Mail to delete emails that say they are from myself, but are really not? I don't really understand what all of these fields mean, and Apple Mail rules don't support access to them. I actually do occasionally forward emails from one of my mail accounts to another, so simply blocking myself is not an option.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Rick’s iMac

Posted on Jul 22, 2023 9:53 PM

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Answer 1

★ Helpful

Barney-15E

Level 10

111,349 points

Jul 23, 2023 3:46 PM in response to AdobeWanKenobe

Don't unsubscribe. Just mark it as junk.

Is there any way I can set up a rule in Apple Mail to delete emails that say they are from myself, but are really not?

You can use the Reply-To header instead of the from. From can be easily spoofed.

You could use that in a custom Junk filter in the Junk Settings in Mail.

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Answer 2

Jul 24, 2023 7:42 AM in response to Barney-15E

Thanks, Barney, I didn't see anything like that in Settings > Junk Mail, but that led me to what may be the solution. I wasn't aware until now that you can add new fields to search for Settings > Rules.

In Rules, the last item in the conditions popup menu is "Edit header list." There I added Reply-To and Received to the list, and then they appeared as new items in the conditions popup. I saw no Reply-To field for the latest spam mail under View > Message > Raw Source, and nothing appeared in the Rules dialog when I chose Reply-To in a new rule, but I was able to pick out maktoob.net in the info found for the Received field. For now, at least, that seems to be working.

I think I'll pass on reporting this to abuse@sailthru.com -- I never know what list I might be added to then!

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Apple Mail, filtering spam when sender appears to be myself

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