John said:
I get a lot of spam from these clowns who think I'm stupid enough to think
they will split millions of dollars with me if I will be their "partner".
These emails typically turn up with the "To" field empty. Can I set up an
Outlook rule that just deletes any email that has an empty "To" field?
Look for a missing "@" character.
Apply this rule after the message arrives
<whatever_action_you_want>
except with "@" in the recipient's address
[stop processing more rules]
Unless you actually need to OR the rules together, end them with the stop
clause. The above rule will perform the action you selected for any e-mails
where the "@" character is missing from the To or Cc headers (there is no
real differentiation between those headers). Basically, you delete (or
whatever) all e-mails UNLESS they have the "@" character in the To/Cc
header.
While spammers may leave this blank and non-spammers usually have something
in those fields (because their e-mail clients don't permit otherwise), those
fields are OPTIONAL and they are NOT used to specify the recipient.
According to RFC, the To, Cc, Subject, Date, and other fields are optional:
they may appear zero or one times. Only the From field is required (per
RFC, not by the sending mail server). The RCPT-TO commands sent by the
e-mail client to the mail server during the SMTP session are what decides
who is/are the recipient(s), and you don't get a copy of those commands.
The To and Cc fields may be absent and the e-mail will still get delivered.
They may exist but be blank, or contain strings which are not e-mail
addresses, or are bogus e-mail addresses, or be a different e-mail address
than the account to which they are sent - because the To/Cc fields are *not*
used to specify the actual recipient of a message. They are just *data*
contained within the sender's message (i.e., the "headers" and "body" are
just one message which is sent during the DATA command from the e-mail
client to the SMPT server).
