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Here's an example of the address they're coming from: enter image description here

I'm familiar with filtering settings, but how can I filter something that's different each time?

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    The commercial spam filtering market is an 850 million dollar industry. If one could hand-craft a simple set of rules to filter out all spam, there would not be such a huge industry around it. You might be able to write rules that filter out some specific spam template that you're getting at the moment, but it likely will not work reliably over the long term.
    – tlng05
    Commented Jun 18, 2020 at 22:53

3 Answers 3

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Your post's body asks about filters. "Filters" require some sort of a match, even a partial one. If there is nothing to match, then filtering is not an effective tool.

But your title asks to "get rid of", and that's a broader goal. If you cannot filter based on sender, then you detect spam by the contents. There are a host of tools and approaches to detect and respond to spam emails:

  • inspect attachments and links for malicious or blocked content
  • inspect the content of the message body for common or malicious content
  • inspect the content of the message body for anomalous content

There is a massive industry around and a thousand approaches to the above.

It is trivial for spammers/phishers to send a million emails from a million different, unrelated sources. Trying to block each one is like playing "whack-a-mole".

Looking at what they send is the more effective approach.

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  • Thank you! I haven't thought about this route but I've made more progress here than by anything else. I appreciate your time. I also noticed they were being sent to rotating domains, meaning <username>@<domain>; where the <username> is the same but the domain would be aol.com, apple.com etc. Is that part of their bot algorithm to walk through all possible domains? @schroeder
    – Ty Conway
    Commented Jun 28, 2020 at 14:38
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The apparent "FROM" is readily faked. Look at the full email headers for several of the spams, odds are good there is a common identifier buried inside that you can use as a filter, it may even be as simple as the originating IP.

Don't forget that your filter need not be an EQUAL match. You may find that a substring match using CONTAINS will work best.

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There isn't any clear-cut method, but you could:-

  • Use your intuition.If the sender's address seems sketchy(either the apparent randomness in the e-mail address or the obscurity in the domain name) or the e-mail is simply from someone who you don't know.

  • You could allocate an hour or two for a one-time organisation of your mailbox,maybe creating subfolders for different purposes such as one for your newsletters, one for e-mails from your colleagues etc. , so that any e-mail you receive that does not automatically fit into these subgroups can be treated as spam.

  • (A radical one,but depends on a lot of factors such as your profession and visibility) Create a new e-mail address and jot off a text/e-mail to your associates about the change,then abandon the current one.

(I'm assuming that your e-mail may have been exposed in breaches,making it impossible to avoid spam)

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