Use deliveredto: Gmail filter to capture non-typical SPAM

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For past 3-4 months I started experiencing a very weird (?) kind of spam:

  • Always landing in Gmail’s Spam folder
  • That I couldn’t filter out using typical methods

Because:

  • Somehow sender (and sender’s domain) was always white-listed and legit
  • Sender was always different (auto-generated)
  • Recipient was also always different and always not my mailbox(es)

In fact, the only common thing about these messages was that always landed in my Spam box in three copies, ultimately (no matter what the recipient was) delivered to my personal and company mailbox.

The word “delivered to” told me what solution I should consider.

Based on available Gmail’s filters I figured out that I need to catch:

  • Spam that lands in my Spam box, pre-filtered by:
    • Spam Assassin on my server
    • Gmail internal anti-spam features
  • Spam that is delivered to my selected mailboxes (no matter what declared recipient is).

So the entire filter’s code would be:

in:spam deliveredto:mailbox@domain.com

Or actually:

in:spam deliveredto:{private@mailbox.me director@company.com}

Gmail warns you that using in:spam filter will cause it to never actually run:

What I found a bit puzzling, because my filter does run as expected! :)

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