Clean Messages from Unusual Senders
The Smart Folder Unusual Senders contains messages from email addresses that appear to contain a large number of numbers or nonsense characters. You can quickly and easily clean these messages by selecting the Unusual Senders Smart Folder in the left-hand navigation menu and choosing a cleaning action next to each group of messages.
What Are Unusual Senders?
Spammers may attempt to circumvent spam filters by sending messages that appear to come from addresses that are intended to look legitimate to spam filters. These addresses may combine randomized characters in the account portion of the address with otherwise legitimate email domains.
However, to a human, these randomized sender addresses may appear as nonsense. For example, they may contain multiple numbers or gibberish letters. Here are some examples of the types of unusual senders that Clean Email can detect:
- 10499.newsletter.12346@londonluxuryprint.com
- 104st450086@tqjh.ntpc.edu.tw
- 11200016074@educacionto.mx
- 12155.info.13774@tepplus.com
- 13gkzdxtmf2tftd@marketplace.amazon.com
- 175070_mvi6729nf@members.ebay.com
When Clean Email detects unusual sender addresses, the messages may appear in the Unusual Senders Smart Folder.
Note: Since anyone creating an email account can generally choose their own account names, and because some automated messages are actually desirable, not all messages sent from unusual senders are spam. You should review the message groups in the Unusual Senders Smart Folder before deleting them.
How to Clean Messages from Unusual Senders
Click the Unusual Senders Smart Folder in the left-hand navigation menu.
In the Unusual Senders Smart Folder, click the sender icon next to a message group to select all messages in the group. You can optionally click anywhere in the group’s row to open the preview pane and deselect individual emails.
In the preview pane, check for any messages that you might want to keep. Use caution in making this determination because some messages from unusual sender addresses may be legitimate. Click the circle next to each message you want to save, to unselect it. The check mark symbol will disappear for each unselected message. After unselecting all the messages you want to keep, click Trash in the quick actions bar at the bottom of the page.
The Move to Trash? dialog appears. Click Confirm if you want to move the remaining, selected messages to the trash.
After you have trashed all the messages you do not want to keep, close the preview pane by clicking the X at the upper right-hand corner.
If you have kept any messages that appear in the Unusual Senders Smart Folder and you would like to prevent them from appearing there in the future, consider pinning them. Pinned messages are never cleaned by Clean Email and do not appear in any Smart Folder. For more information, please see Pinned Messages.
Creating an Auto Clean Rule for Unusual Sender Messages
Auto Clean is a powerful, advanced feature available to Clean Email users who have a Premium subscription. Using Auto Clean, you can create custom rules that let Clean Email clean messages as they arrive in your account, delivering them where you want them or moving them to the trash, archiving, or deleting them.
Caution: Auto Clean will follow the exact instructions you give it automatically and without notification to you. If there are some messages from unusual sender addresses that you do not want to automatically delete, you should pin the domain(s) of those addresses before activating an Auto Clean rule. For more information, please see Pinned Messages.
To create an Auto Clean rule to automatically and periodically clean the messages that appear in Unusual Senders, click Auto Clean in the left-hand navigation menu and then click the plus at the top of the page (Create Rule). Keep in mind that messages that appear in Unusual Senders and other Smart Folders may be in any location or folder within your email account. For example, sending Unusual Senders messages to the trash may affect messages from your inbox or other custom folders in your email account.
In the popup dialog, enter a name for the rule in the Name this rule… field. Then, click the Inbox drop-down in the For messages section and select Unusual Senders from the list.
Next, you can optionally click the Old Mail filter button. You can skip this step if you want to delete all emails as they come.
The button changes to Older than 6 months. Click it again and then indicate how long messages should remain in the Unusual Senders folder before Clean Email takes action on them. In the following example illustration, the selected age is messages older than two weeks.
Now, click Choose action and configure what Clean Email will do to the messages.
Finally, click Create Rule.
For more information on working with Auto Clean rules, please see Creating and Editing Auto Clean Rules.
Caution: If there are some messages from unusual sender addresses that you do not want to automatically delete, you should pin the domain(s) of those addresses before activating an Auto Clean rule. For more information, please see Pinned Messages.
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