Why is the iPhone mail junk filter so useless?

Question

Level 4

1,348 points

Why is the iPhone mail junk filter so useless?

I have an IMAP account with GoDaddy (handled by Microsoft) whose mailings are sent to iPhone Mail and Mac Mail. The spam is filtered correctly by the mail account as seen on the web, but all of the junk is still forwarded to Mail, which filters none of it. No matter how many times I designate a sender as junk, Mail does not learn. Even setting up a block for an address doesn't prevent it from being delivered to the Inbox. (Frankly, I'm not sure what block is for if not to prevent that.)

In contrast, virtually all of the spam is properly sent to the junk folder on the Mac.

Why is junk filtering so much less effective — which is to say, totally ineffective — on the iPhone?

iPhone 12 mini

Posted on Sep 21, 2022 2:08 PM

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Answer 1

Sep 21, 2022 2:19 PM in response to Satchmo

There is no junk mail filter on iPhones, unless you add a 3rd party spam filter app.

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Answer 2

deggie

Level 10

167,525 points

Sep 21, 2022 3:12 PM in response to Satchmo

Macs use a different method to get email than mobile devices do and even a 10 year old Mac has more capability to filer mail than a mobile device. But the main problem is battery life, for a junk mail filter to be effective it has to constantly scan incoming mail and perform computations/rules. This would not be so bad if you only got 5 to 10 emails per day, but if your are getting 100 or more it will use up a lot of battery. And it is constantly running in the background. Mobile devices can't do a lot of things that computers can do (whether Mac or PC) and until we have a battery breakthrough to move on from lithium polymer batteries this limitation will remain.

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Answer 3

deggie

Level 10

167,525 points

Sep 21, 2022 2:33 PM in response to Satchmo

You would need to create a contact for every junk mail that came in and block it. Since they used spoofed email addresses this will grow in size rapidly.

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Answer 4

deggie

Level 10

167,525 points

Sep 21, 2022 2:41 PM in response to Satchmo

Then they are probably coming in with a spoofed email address that doesn't match the one in the contact.

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Answer 5

Satchmo Author

Level 4

1,348 points

Sep 21, 2022 3:04 PM in response to deggie

A recent iPhone is far more powerful than Macs were when then had effective spam filters decades ago, and I very much doubt that a great deal of anything is required to filter spam. The nature of an email could be determined before it ever reached a device. In fact, Apple has some information about filtering in iCloud.

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Answer 6

Satchmo Author

Level 4

1,348 points

Sep 21, 2022 2:29 PM in response to Lawrence Finch

That is the fourth most depressing thing I've learned today. Why doesn't block work?

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Answer 7

Satchmo Author

Level 4

1,348 points

Sep 21, 2022 2:36 PM in response to deggie

Even the ones I have specifically blocked are not prevented from going to the inbox. Are you suggesting that the visible address might be spoofed and therefore not blockable?

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