Spam Reporting For Mobile Clients is a Must
Yesterday I was lamenting the apparent rise in spam making its way to my email inboxes. I’m still not sure of the cause because generally, my two Gmail accounts have been rock-solid in terms of blocking spam messages. Perhaps the spammers have new techniques? A comment from Dutchman indicated that Google is aware of some recent issue on the spam front, so there’s hope on the horizon.
This morning I had 13 new messages in my personal Gmail account and seven were spam that didn’t get caught. After some thought, I realized that I may have been causing at least some of my issues. Roughly half of all my mail is read on my Apple iPhone. Guess what the mail client is missing on that device? There’s no way to report spam! Now I generally delete email prior to reading if it looks like spam, but sometimes, I do open these messages just to be sure. Could I have been inadvertently training Google that these messages actually aren’t spam?
Apple should definitely address this gap in an updated client, in my opinion. In fact, it was only last month when Google updated their own mobile web client to offer advanced menu options. I see the “Report Spam” in there now, but I don’t think it was there until the most recent update. Until Apple adds a spam reporting mechanism to their iPhone client, I may have to use Gmail on the web with my handset. After all, when I’m mobile, I tend to have more distractions and less time to be productive. I don’t need further time-wasters like gobs of spam showing up on my handset’s inbox.
Does your mobile mail client offer a way to report spam?
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Actually, its there. Its just not obvious. With Gmail (whether in the web interface, a thick client like Thunderbird, or the iPhone), moving a message to the Spam folder is the same as marking it as spam. So in the iPhone you can hit Edit, select all the spam messages, the choose Move and choose your Spam folder. This A) gets them moved in bulk and B) does in fact update Google anti-spam engine.
NOTE: since I mentioned Thunderbird above… TBird has its own anti-spam engine. Marking a message as Junk in TBird does nothing for Gmail accounts except perhaps to delete the email based on whatever rules you have setup for the Junk mail controls. But dragging it to the Gmail Spam folder in your IMAP list does update the Gmail spam engine.
Good to know and I suppose I should have been moving messages to Spam on my iPhone instead of deleting them all this time. Thanks! :)
Funny you should mention Gmail spam. I marked every one of the millions of Karen Thomas PR messages as spam yesterday. Yahoo’s already sending her direct to the junk folder, hopefully Google will catch on too. Too bad ready, since OWC is a decent company worth following.
The Gmail client for Blackberry has a Mark as Spam function. Dont have to use it much since they are still doing a good job for me but its nice to know its there.
I don’t think Apple is going to be adding spam reporting features for a singl mail provider. What is probably needed long term is a standard way for email clients to report to mil servers. Google uses the simple expedient of allowing you to move mail to the SPAM folder, which of course all IMAP clients should be able to do.
Dave:
We’ve removed you from our database and you could’ve been removed at any time by looking at our disclaimer on the bottom on every press release we send as per spam laws.
Sorry to be a necromancer but 7 messages…. 7 messages??? And that prompts you to write a blog post??
If you’d have got a few hundred I could understand it but 7!!!
Anyway, spam just lets you know that someone loves you, I recently changed email addresses and thought something was wrong. When there was no spam :)