I get a lot of spam – mostly emails asking if I’m interested in funding for my business – from a wide variety of random email addresses. I don’t know if these are made up, spoofed or stolen. They all look legit enough so that they pass my host’s spam filter (which I’ve tweaked, to no avail).
My latest strategy is to right click and select “block contact” on all of these, but I suspect that since they come in from new addresses daily, this is a pointless task and I’m wondering if I’m creating an enormous database of blocked addresses that my affect Apple Mail’s performance.
Anyway, my questions are:
Is there a better way to handle this?
Am I generating some enormous file that will eventually a problem?
The way I handle it is with a local spam filter (like SpamSieve, for example). The senders are likely exploiting the fact that the email accounts they use don’t have proper DMARC configuration (and lots don’t) which tells the receiving server to reject the message if it’s sent from an illegitimate host. So blocking the contact, as you suspect, is a nearly pointless task.
You are correct that spammers can easily change the sender email to avoid being blocked.
With macOS you can set up Rules in Apple Mail that might help. For example, phrases in the subject line or body of the email that are likely to indicate spam. You can send these to a spam folder to review later or, if you are confident in the filtering, automatically delete the message.