How do I filter out emails which were not sent to me?

Question

Somehow I've started getting a lot of spam messages that aren't actually sent to me. The to field will usually be a couple of AOL addresses. I would like to filter these out but can't make a universal filter like "to:aol.com" because I sometimes get legitimate emails to other people from there. I've tried combinations of

• to:-me (catches anything sent to anyone, even if it was also sent to me)
• to:-me and not in:sent
• to:aol.com and not in:sent (catches things others CC'ed aol.com on but doesn't actually catch the spam.

I need something which will filter only messages which don't have me in the to, cc, or bcc fields.

Answer 1

Somehow I've started getting a lot of spam messages that aren't actually sent to me

This isn't really technically feasible. The reason these email messages are sent to you might not be obvious though. The emails might contain your address in the bcc field. They may also be sent to email addresses that are actually email lists and the email list might contain your address.

My personal email address probably receives 10 to 15 spam messages per day and it's super annoying. This is why most people have moved on from email and only use it for commercial communication, while using other messaging services for personal communication.

In this case, it's probably best to mark the message as spam and disable email notifications on your devices so this junk doesn't proactively bother you.