How can I block emails with no sender?

TM Maine, while i agree that Apple will deal with the apparently new (no sender) email spam technique, there are two solutions in this thread that seem like they will work, although I have not yet implemented either. 1) a "Remove-me" button appears at the bottom of all of my (no sender) emails. Apparently you can create a rule that checks for the text "Remove-me" in the body of the email and if fond sends the email to junk or trash or where ever. (For heaven's sake, of course don't click on the "Remove-me" button!!!), and 2) Apparently you can filter email senders for the "@" symbol. I think the method is to move all emails to junk and then restore only those emails with the "A" sharacter in the sender field. Not sure of the details as I haven't yet tried this.

Yes, Charles, there are two ways described earlier in this discussion that have been used to successfully eliminate the (no sender) emails:

1) In Apple mail, move every incoming message to the trash (this step may have been "move to junk", check earlier messages in this thread). After incoming email is moved, filter all messages for the "@" character. If the message contains the "@" character, move the message to the inbox. Original poster of this method says you can do it in Apple Mail Preferences but check the earlier posts for exact instructions.

2) Again in Apple Mail, filter all incoming messages for the text string "Remove-me". If "Remove-me" is present, move the incoming email to the trash. Again Apple Mail Preferences is supposed to be able to do this. Again check the earlier messages in this discussion for the original post on this idea.

("Remove-me" is a clickable button at the bottom of the (no sender) emails. Of course don't click that button!!! All of my (no sender) emails have the "Remove-me" button at the bottom of the email, but obviously this spam exploit could be used without the "Remove-me" button. )

I only get one (no sender) per day so I have not attempted either #1 or #2.

I also have Roadrunner email and my old iMac cannot update macOS beyond Big Sur. There is one poster, earlier in this thread, who has the same problem on macOS Ventura so the problem may occur for Roadrunner regardless of macOS.

FYI to all readers on this discussion thread: Someone, presumably an Apple agent, is curating this discussion thread.

I know this because since I started this discussion thread on August 19, 2023 (about three weeks ago) many messages have been deleted from this discussion thread and the non-deleted messages have been rearranged in what appears order of importance. So I conclude Apple is curating this thread.

Apple's curation of this thread appears to me to be a good idea as the key solutions to the problem are easier to locate.

However the curation does have the disadvantage that if you wanted to reply to a specific contributor you may not be able if that contributor's message was deleted. I am brand new to this forum. Perhaps there are message thread display options which are user selectable and I am simply unaware. Or not.

Apple's curation of this thread begs several questions. Maybe readers of this thread will know the answers? Certainly the curator/s could chime in with some useful info.

1) What happened to the "me too" button? When I first visited this thread today I saw a "me too" button with "43" displayed adjacent to the "me too" button. I concluded that 42 people besides me have this problem. But then I signed in and the "me too" button is nowhere to be found.

2) How many "me toos" are needed to raise the priority of this issue sufficiently high for Apple to fix the problem? For this (no sender) problem, seems likely the Mail App could be revised in less than sixty seconds.

I think pfsonline may have given us the solution. Creating the rule in the Apple Mail app took me less than one minute and I have never created an Apple Mail Rule before. I will update in a few days after I see if its working for me.

pfsonline's solution did not work for me because it moved ALL of my inbox messages to the trash. it took me 15 minutes to move them all back.

Seems to me that pfsonline's solution should have worked. I entered the intructions correctly in the Apple Mail rules dialog box, i think. "From" "does not contain" "." So I don't know what went wrong. It appears to me that the Apple Mail Rules are not working correctly for me in this instance? macOS Big Sur 11.6.5

VikingOSX, I don't think your suggestion will work. The Apple Mail Rules dialog box uses a character string. If you enter the character string "no sender" into the dialog box, the Rule will delete messages that have the character string "no sender" in the From field. But in this particular spam exploit, the From field is empty (also known as null in computer science jargon). With this spam exploit, the From field is an empty array of characters.

I agree with jtonn. we have a winner! four emails overnight went to trash. As BDAqua notes, filetering on the character "@" should also work. The real problem here, in techno-jive terms, is that the From field contains an empty character array. I wonder is there a wildcard character that could be entered into the Apple Mail Rules dialog box that would detect ANY character. But probs we don't need that as filtering on "." or "@" should work against an empty character array.

I have marked pfsonline's solution as the answer. It should also work with filtering on the character "@". Don't make the mistake as I did to include the quotation marks in the Apple Mail Rules dialog box.

I have marked pfsonline's solution as "Best Answer". I think that will prioritize so everyone sees the solution.

Hi Anniebec. Your situation sounds like the "blocked sender" function of the apple mail app is not working. I am running apple mail app on macos big sur 11.7.10 and i have never received mail form a blocked sender. So the apple mail app is working perfectly in that regard for me. And that's kind of a perfect summary of the pecularities with apps malfunctioning.

I started this thread because I thought my Apple Mail app was malfunctioning but I learned that the app was not malfunctioning and I just had to set the Apple Mail controls more specifically to eliminate the problem. The fix turned out to be easy, but it took a couple of months on this thread to solve my specific problem.

What I recommend for you is to start a new thread on this discussions.apple.com website specifically for your problem. For example, you could create a new google email account, send an email to yourself, block that sender, and then send another email to see if it gets blocked. If the second email is not blocked, then you have a very specific case that would work very well, I think, as a new thread on this website. If the second email is blocked, then you should still start a thread on this website but it might be trickier to fix your issue. Or not, I don't really know:)

Perhaps my experience will be helpful to you. When I first posted what I claimed was a defect in the Apple Mail app, the first responses that I received were something like "so many apple users and you are the only one with this problem?". After a few weeks other people with my problem chimed in and at that point it was clear my issue was a real issue. And then a few weeks after that, someone suggested to make an Apple Mail rule that blocked all messages that did not contain a period in the "From" email address. The solution email is posted at the top of this thread. And that fixed the problem. But many posters posted on this thread who did not know how to do that. So if you do post on this website, expect that it might take a few months to get to the fix. You might have to try several things that don't work before you get to a solution. I understand my issue is not the same as yours, but I thought it might be helpful to you to learn what my path was. Prior to starting this thread, I had never used this website before.

So that's about all I can suggest. Good Luck!!!