filtering mail sent to my address BUT the the first name in the header is different

I am getting email where the header reads— jane doe <john doe@aaaa.bbb>
I believe someone named Jane Doe registered with a site using my email address and my name is John Doe (yes I have changed the names…but you get the gist). I have tried using an Apple Mail rule to move email to jane doe to the trash. But it just results in all mail to me getting moved to trash. I looked in spam sieve to see if i could set up a rule as Mail does not appear to have boolean logic rules. In the blocklist you can set rules for mail “sent from” but you cannot set for mail “sent to”. The biggest problem is that the mail is addressed to my email address but has Jane’s name next to my email address in the header. I’m not sure I made my situation clear…actually I’m sure I’ve made a mess of things. But if anyone has any hints, I would greatly appreciate help.

First of all: are these messages spam? Or is this an honest mistake where someone entered the wrong address? If the latter, perhaps you could write to the site and get them to change it.

SpamSieve does not currently have a way to make a blocklist rule based on the To name (rather than the To address).

Since e-mail addresses cannot contain spaces, it seems like you could create some Mail rules that match these messages.

If all of the following conditions are met:

[INDENT]To contains “john_doe@aaaa.bbb”
To contains “Jane Doe”[/INDENT]

thanks for the reply
As far as I can tell all the messages I get appear to be spam. None are messages are from a friend of “jane”. Is this a new tactic by spammers?

By the way…I absolutely love spam sieve. I am a biochemist at a university and recommend spam sieve to all my mac using colleagues.

Thanks for the recommendation for a set of rules. The question I have is will the rule “jane doe” recognize the entire “jane doe” as one variable or will it find email that contains “doe” as well? That is the problem I’ve run into. I set a mail rule to move To “Jane Doe” to trash but it caught all the mail that contained either “jane” or “Doe” which unfortunately includes all real mail to me.

No, it’s been going on for a while. If the messages are spam, my general recommendation is to train them as spam and let that be the end of it. SpamSieve can learn to recognize the messages, and that way you don’t have to complicate your rule setup. Making your own rules can work, of course, but it’s surprisingly error-prone, and for most users there is little benefit.

Apple does not document how it’s supposed to work. On my Mac (running 10.5.5) it seems to only match messages where the To contains the entire phrase.