Chances are you’ve received spam that somehow found its way into your inbox, and nowhere in the email does your email address appear in To, Cc or Bcc.

You can use this to your advantage to slow spam by specifically requiring your email address to be in To, Cc or Bcc to be delivered to your inbox.

Important note before continuing: This method does have drawbacks; they’re listed after the instructions. Be sure to read them.

How to set up a required "To" filter for inbox delivery

Yahoo! Mail

Create a new filter where if the recipient does not contain your email address to move the message to the Trash folder.

Hotmail

Create a new rule that specifies if the To/cc address does not contain your email address to delete the message.

Gmail

Create a new filter, and in the To: field type a dash and then your email address:

The dash means "not", or in this specific instance "doesn’t contain".

Click the Next Step button on the same screen.

On the next screen, check the box Delete it, like this:

…and then click the Create Filter button.

Drawbacks

These are important to know any may be instant deal-breakers for some of you.

Some newsletters you receive may be deleted by mistake. PCMech’s newsletter wouldn’t because if you notice, your email address is directly in the To: field for each newsletter you receive from us; this is specifically done to ensure proper delivery. Other newsletters however may use To: as something else entirely, and if they do, any required-To: filter you’re using will send that to the Trash on arrival.

Mail delivered from other accounts will be sent to the Trash. Fortunately this one is an easy fix – simply add more recipients for whatever other accounts you receive mail from.

Sites that anonymize your address on delivery will be sent to the Trash. Craigslist for example anonymizes email addresses by default when people reply to your listings.

Unsure of whether this would work for you? Use a test folder.

Instead of setting up the filter to deliver messages that don’t match your email address to Trash, have them sent to a test folder of your choosing instead. For example, you could use a folder named "Filtered" for testing purposes. If you find having a To: filter works the way you want, you can modify it to send to Trash later. If not, simply remove the filter.

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