From time to time almost everyone receives email from an unknown source trying to sell you something you really don't want or need. The most popular scams involve the sale of cheap prescription drugs, credit card debt relief, mortgage refinancing, and the occasional message from someone in Nigeria asking for your bank account information in exchange for a $1,000,000. In the past, these emails could readily be thwarted by spam filters and blacklists. However, in recent months email users have been seeing a lot of spam from themselves to themselves. That is to say, both the "From" and "To" address match the legitimate email address of the email user. Spam of this sort is very confusing because most people don't intentionally spam themselves.
What is happening here is that spammers are data mining email addresses (usually from public web sites such as employee lists or lists of family members) then generating fake email that appears to be from the email recipient. The ever more clever spammers are exploiting weaknesses in email systems and are, at the same time, making it difficult for email users to combat the unwanted email without inadvertently adding their own email address to their blacklist. How then does one deal with this problem?
One solution is to build a "filter" or "rule" (or whatever it is called in your email program) to block the unwanted mail. Set up the following conditions in your filter:
1. If the "From" address is your email address, and...
2. If the "To" address is your email address, and...
3. If the character string "()" is not in the subject line, then 4. Delete the incoming message
In the example above you can substitute your own secret easy-to-remember character string for the string "()". A filter such as the one above will block most, if not all, of the unwanted emails from/to you, except the emails you send yourself whose subject line contains your secret character string. This scheme will allow you to send email to yourself without getting blocked by your filter.
Give it a try and let me know how it works!