iPhone 4 can be useless for email due to spam
There is an inherent problem with the iPhone, even in its latest iteration. If you have email addresses that have been out in the open a long time, but which are your main addresses, you can’t find your actual email for all the spam.
As an example, one often has email addresses that are most associated with us, since they have been ours for many years. My primary address, the one that most of my clients use, and that my widespread family uses, is almost 20 years old. I actually have two email addresses like that. Spam was less of a problem back then and as the receipt of illicit email began to accelerate, that address was picked up by a huge number of email address harvesters and is now probably most of the spam email address lists in the world, having been sold, bartered or stolen by those greedy, uncaring dolts that are behind spam email.
That address, therefore gets over a thousand emails a day. Most of those are marked as spam by my Web host, though not as well as I would like to have them filtered. Even so, many hundreds get through every day to my primary computer, where I use the ill-designed Mac Mail spam functionality to trim it down to a more reasonable size and only have to deal with a few hundred each day.
I know, I should change my email address. But what if a client has an emergency and needs to contact me, or my Aunt Polly dies suddenly in the Dakotas? Some people simply refuse to use any email address other than the old, venerable one they have been using for years. So if I change my email address, maybe to a Gmail address (as recommended by this Notebooks.com story), I will never be able to help those people. Instead, I would just be leaving my email laying around on the servers of a company who has proven that they do not care about my privacy in any shape or form and not getting email that I need to care about.
So, I keep that old email address, and I keep getting thousands of spam emails per day. Apple has chosen to simply ignore the spam email situation that is overwhelming users all across the globe. If I shut down my Mac or put it to sleep when I go out, every email that has been marked as spam by my Web host get through and, of course, my Mac is not then in the loop to catch any of the other spam either.
For my purposes, the iPhone is useless for email. If I am gone for a few hours and then retrieve mail on my iPhone, I get at least many hundreds of spam emails that I have to look through to find any non-spam emails that may have come in while I was out. It frankly is not worth the trouble. I find myself amazed by Apples attitude on this issue, and further astonished that they think they can sell this phone to businesses, either large or small, without providing a solution for the problem of spam and email privacy.
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August 17th, 2010
You could use Google Apps free Gmail and use the domain name you have pointed to their MX servers, in this way most of the spam is trapped by Google and very efficently as well. I have this is operation for at least 6 well known email addresses, use all Apple products and almost never have an issue with spam. My 2 cents worth.
August 17th, 2010
Can’t you change the spam settings on the server?
I know it’s a stupid question but most email servers offer the ability to filter spam – but who am I telling
I get spam on my google account too but it never got on my iphone because the spamfilter isolates it anyway…
Anyhow, they might not be to reliable, filtering stuff they should not, but hey, 500 spam mails less a day can make a difference, right?
But it remains an issue I agree:
It could actually be worse to search for the one important mail that accidentaly got in the spamfolder…
August 17th, 2010
You can use GMail as a host for your emails and still retain the old email address (I currently run a setup like that for my business). Spam is then no longer an issue. I haven’t needed a spam filter on my workstation , laptop or phone for over a year now.
August 17th, 2010
I think you criticize the wrong target here. It’s not the iPhone that’s useless, it’s Apple’s Mail app, which is and always has been one of the worst spam filtering mail apps known to man.
As Rimmer says above, you can overcome this so easily. You can use gMail (or, since you also seem bitter about Google, almost any other hosting service’s email program) and either use its superior spam filter or set up a whitelist (another failing in Apple’s mail service).
I’m a big Apple fan. Between me and my wife we own 9 different Apple computers and iDevices. But Mail has sucked from the beginning. Other than the UI, which is great, the app is a complete bust. I suggest you do a bit of digging and find a solution that will work as well as gMail (or close to it) whose publisher you don’t distrust. The hours you save every day will be worth however long that takes. And you can make the change absolutely transparent to your regular correspondence.
August 17th, 2010
As I said in the article, I would prefer not to use gmail because I disapprove of Google’s privacy antics and I don’t want any of my information on their servers. I found a solution today and will write it up as soon as I know it is working perfectly
August 18th, 2010
compared to apple google are practically bastions of personal privacy. have you read apple’s privacy policy recently? :http://www.apple.com/privacy/
August 31st, 2010
Hi,
I’m having the exact same problem, and looking forward to you solution?