No Spam Filter? iPad, You're KILLING ME!
So, I love my iPad, don’t get me wrong. I love it so much that I set up all my email to go there as a way to stay curent and up-to-date with my mail even when I’m not at the “big-big-computer” as Jaryth calls it. But holy spam insanity, Batman! All of my accounts have spam filters on them at the server level. And they work at about 3 different effectiveness levels:
- Excellent - Accounts like Gmail seem to get almost zero spam. Which is wonderful. I’m only subjected to all the myriad newsletters I stupidly signed up for myself. “Where did that unsubscribe button go???”
- Mid-range - Some accounts have tools like Postini behind them, and that catches about 80% of the spam.
- Bad!!! - And one account I have has a spam filter on it, but that filter doesn’t catch things like the current rash of blueberry emails. I want to tell that filter “if they sent me the email four times, I don’t want to see it even once.”
All of this doesn’t matter when I’m happily working on big-big-computer - as my email client also has a spam filter that effectively protects me from the ugly realities of blueberries and home refinances and so on.
But my iPad is Missing a Filter Button
This is driving me crazy. I may have to turn off the accounts that have bad filtering, as I spend more time deleting the crap than I do reading the mail. Unfortunately, one of those accounts is one that I get rare but important messages on, and the senders are almost never online when I am on my computer. The iPad has saved me from missing appointments and other problems twice already in the short time I’ve had it.
But is deleting billions of spam messages really worth it? I’m not sure.
What Seems Strange is that No One Seems to Care
This has apparently been an issue on the iPhone and iPod touch as well, but when I search the Web I can’t find anything about it other than a few sites saying “yep, there are no filters on the IPhone/iPod touch/iPad mail client”. Frustrating!