An app to solve iPhone 4 spam problems
It may be that solving spam problems on the iPhone 4, which neither allows for nor provides protection from spam email, is not anything done to the iPhone itself, but rather to the machine that is its mother ship.
Unless you want to use a gmail address, as opposed to an address on your own server or Web host, there are not many good options for keeping spam off of your iPhone. The problem that brought this issue to the fore was described in this column, basically that it was very difficult to keep spam off your iPhone if you were using a very old email address that was already on most of the spam lists on the planet.
One solution, described here, involved the addition of a new email account on the iPhone and writing a couple of specific rules in Apple Mail. Essentially, getting your important mail on the iPhone involves forwarding everything that gets through your somewhat porous server-side filter and is also from someone in your contact list. This was done using Mac Mail, but could have been done in Windows or using another good email client.
As a part of this same discussion on Plurk with SteveBob and AZJazzyJ, the latter brought up the spam filtering program Spamsieve, recommending it highly. Although Spamsieve is a Mac-only product, there may well be a high quality Bayesian spam filtering system available for Windows, as well. If you know of one, please leave your recommendation in the comments. This iPhone issue certainly is not limited to Mac users.
Taking AZJazzyJ’s advice, I downloaded and installed the free trial of Spamsieve. Installation was painless, and getting it integrated with Mac Mail took just a few minutes. The improvement over the rules-only solution was instantaneous and complete. I stopped getting email in my inbox, period. Shortly after installing the free trial, it was clear that the program worked, so I paid for ($30) and registered it. In the five days since installation, four or five total spam emails have gotten into my inbox, while 250-300 per day have been properly identified as spam. In the first two days, 3-4 pieces of good mail were identified as spam. In both cases, I used the Spamsieve training methodology (simple keyboard shortcuts) to identify the errors and none of them have recurred.
All of my email addresses (I maintain a number of Web sites and have an email address for each) is of the POP variety. Spamsieve says that it works even better with IMAP addresses. I have been considering that change for some time anyway, and will probably go ahead and do with on the recommendation from Spamsieve. When I finalize that change and see how it works, I’ll write an article to follow up on this one. In the interim, even with POP accounts, it has proved to be an excellent solution.
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August 25th, 2010
As much as I like to bash the Jesus Phone, but I don’t think that spam is really it’s problem. Gmail are not the only people who employ spam filters. I would have thought pretty much any web host that offers an IMAP email account with remote email storage has some filter. If theirs isn’t doing the job then just switch to someone who does. 1&1 do a great job with theirs for example. The phone is completely innocent in all this, so why place the burden on it?