I get regular messages to my personal email address (Mail) purporting to be from Facebook with a subject heading “Andy, you have 3 new notifications and 7 friend requests”. I’m almost certain they are spam because my FB account is linked to a different address (Gmail), the subject heading is always the same and the message isn’t true anyway.

I’ve fiddled endlessly with the monstrously baffling FB privacy and notification settings but to no avail. It’s not hard to simply delete the emails unread but their persistence is becoming annoying. I’ve tried marking them as Junk but that doesn’t seem to work. My understanding of Mail’s Junk Mail facility is that, once an email is marked as junk, it’s learnt about it and future like messages are are moved to the Junk mailbox bypassing my Inbox. This works with all other junk I've marked as such. In the Junk Mail Preferences, I’ve ticked the “Perform custom actions” button and included the condition Subject contains “Andy, you have 3 new notifications and 7 friend requests”. Nup, doesn’t seem to work.

There must be something wrong about my approach to the issue. Does anyone have any advice (other than it’s the 21st century, just live with it)?

cheers
Andy, you have 3 new notifications and 7 friend requests

iMac 27 in late 2013 16GB, High Sierra 10.13.6

Have you looked into Mail > Prefs > Rules where you can "tell" Mail to automatically delete new email that fulfills your preset conditions without your ever seeing it?

(Is it possible that FB has your personal email address because people have got you listed as a contact with that address?)

Thanks Artie. I knew you guys would have a better idea! I was diverted by the idea of a custom action in the Junk preferences and never thought about the separate "Rules" preference. Have now created a Rule which should move FB stuff to the Junk mailbox as a test before changing it to delete instead of move.

It is certainly possible that FB has my personal email for the reason you suggest although I wonder why the message is always about 3 notifications and 7 friends. I'm a little alarmed that I have 7 friends I knew nothing about!

Andy

They may be persistent because you've never responded to them. (The "friends" may be "Friend" requests from people you knew years ago who've tracked you down.)

FB is insidious as far as data collection and correlation goes!

I once got a "Friend" request, and at the bottom were the names of three people "you may know", and I did know two of them, and there's no known connection or link between any of the "befriender" and the two people I knew. The episode scared me away from FB forever. (I clicked on the included "Never darken my doorstep again!" link.)

That was my one and only FB experience, although I'm certain that they've got a record of every public page I've ever looked at, albeit attached to my ISP address, not my name.

Facebook "you may know" is a "six degrees of separation" thing (Millennials or younger, see this description :/).

Like you said, Facebook can go very deep, so the connection may not be obvious.

Thanks for the link to six degrees of separation. Fascinating and self evident when you think about it and probably even more applicable to myself who is substantially pre-millennial!

Artie's suggested Rule works a treat and I will now change the action to delete. Now all I have to do is to have my mobile do the same thing...

As long as the account is IMAP ou don't have to change anything on your mobil device. Your non-mobil device will move the offending messages to the trash — assuming it is on and running and Mail is running in either background or foreground.

That's true as long as both devices are signed into the same iCloud account and Mail is set to sync on both.

This may seem contrary to generic IMAP, but I have my iPhone set so it does not sync one of my mail accounts with the same account on my iMac. If I delete an e-mail on the iPhone, it remains on my iMac. Reversing the settings on each device would do the vice versa deletion.

This is in the nature of a final comment. I did wonder whether it's worth resurrecting this topic but I despair of the Junk Mail filter in Mail. No matter how many times I tell it the sender is or is not junk (or fiddle with the junk settings, reset the filter and re-train it or add it the sender to Contacts (again)), the damn thing won't learn.

The one thing that has worked is the Rule in relation to Facebook notifications, now up to 51, including one referring to my son who has been a Friend for many years as well as sharing my DNA.

I don't get that much junk and, rather than routinely checking the Junk mailbox for mis-filtered emails, I think I might just turn the filter off altogether and delete junk from the primary Mailbox as it arrives. I'll not miss anything important then.

There are no few online merchants who use a variety of email names and some even use different domains for different parts of the same organization which makes spam identification challenging for any Spam filter software. Every once in a while I go through the spam folder and when I find a good message, I mark it as Good and add the email address to an entry in Contacts I have named NOT SPAM. There are currently 30 or 40 emails for that contact, but it seems to work.

I have excellent results with Spamsieve which works with several email clients including Mail. It highly configurable and optionally uses macOS Contacts as well as its own whitelist & blocklist, the Habeas Safelist and its sensitivity is user adjustable. Unfortunately it is NOT free. The license costs $30.

Thanks joemmikeb, great idea. And I will check out Spamsieve. I have no problem paying for software that usefully extends my computing experience beyond what Apple provides as standard. I like free sofware as much as the next person of course but if it does the job consistently, doesn't unexpectedly stuff up my system and is well supported I'm happy to shell out! Not a big fan of the subscription model though.