I get a lot of spam to my old and unused mac.com address. I have tried to use mail preferences to make rules to send all mac.com mail to trash or have it auto deleted but back it comes...over and over again. Seems to me that Apple should have figured out a way to block mac.com by now. Maybe somebody will see this post....I can't find the correct devices and topics to use.
Mac mini, macOS 12.6
There is a way to -- very carefully -- delete an old, unused Mac.com address. Which would do away with all the mail to that address on the iCloud server. But if it could be being used to identify your iCloud account, it needs to be done in a way that involves the associated Apple ID ... and quite likely will require re-logging into that ID on all your devices that use it. I recommend contacting Apple Support and having them talk you through the process.
Meanwhile, I would be marking and moving to Junk all the spam I could find in the Inbox for that Mac.com address per this Support article. You should find that it will cut down new spam significantly:
Report and reduce spam in iCloud Mail - Apple Support
I will talk to Apple. All my spam is coming from the use of this old address. I even use SpamSieve but that doesn't train for all of it. For now I went into iCloud and made a rule there that if any mail was to that address it was to be marked as read and moved to junk. If I turn off the "load remote content" I'm not sure how it gets opened when I want it to. I do that with a Thunderbird account and it just shows me an option to open it. I'm so tired of dealing with this that I use two other programs to try to counter it and stop it. Thank you for the link it was valuable.
Itʻs been years since I used Thunderbolt, but Iʻm pretty sure it has an equivalent setting. Though it might be called something different, like “Always Load HTML images” (which you would turn off).
What you want: whatever program you use to open and view the message, is to tell that program not to automatically load those extra images from the spammerʻs server. The programs which will display email messages without images should pug up a link or button in or next to the displayed message which will load those images if you click on it. I also have a gmail account which I use via its web interface which has offers that setting, and Iʻve been reading my gmail without images for years.
How do I block mail to mac.com address
