How do I block junk mail from going to my iPhone and iPad?

As people is suggesting here the solution is to find a decent antispam solution on the server side that works on your inbox and then no matter what device you use all is cleaned up.

Usually this kind of solutions have not been available for general consumers, but to enterprise that have access to the email servers and can configure a variety of filters and extensions.

However this situation has changed: I have been recently using SpamPhobia and I am extremely happy with the results.

The solution consists of a set of robots that scans your inbox. Depending on the kind of email provider you use, password may be required, for example for Gmail and Microsoft accounts (i.e. msn, live, hotmail, outlook) you just need to authorize the app. This can be an stopper for some users, for security concerns, although I have read the privacy and terms policy and they look safe, specially considering I am not offering different access that the one my email provider employees already have ....

The antispam solution is totally free, although there is a paid version that cleans more frequently and includes also threat protection (Virus, malware, phishing) and distribution list management, basically allows you to see what lists you are subscribed to, it move them all out of your inbox by default and then you can select which one you are interested.

Although the company looks very young the product is probably one of the best I have tried so far and the best is it looks they are doing quite active developments and have a nice support.

Hope helps.

I don't understand what any of you are saying. All I know is that I've never had a problem before with junk mail/spam until recently when I purchased the 7 plus... now all I get is sex mail and I can't get rid of it! I've been into my webmail server to get rid of it and it's not there? Err I hate it

So what does moving to this junk box do?

Is there a filtering mechanism that is linked to this box?

If the iPhone mail app simply had “mark as junk”, that’s all we need. I’ll be happy if it uses the same logic as in the Mac mail.

Filtering has to be done on the server. There is no spam filter built into iOS.

ditto what KT said...if you are using Outlook or some other e-mail client, they can have client side junk mail filtering..but this will only affect the view the specific client has of the inbox, not what is on the server, or what is sent from the server to the iOS device. We used to see this happen a lot with our Blackberry devices...the mail delivered to the mobile device is delivered directly from the server and not affected by client side filtering.

Sorry KT, but that answer is ridiculous.

Since 2007 there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of messages on this discussion forum about the need for client-side email filtering on the iPhone. Server-side filtering has two major problems:

1. Many people using the same server/service have different notions of what’s SPAM. I might need to see marketing messages from some firm I work with and ignore political messages. You might work in politics and want to filter something completely different. There is not way for a service to filter out SPAM unless it has individual data on what to filter out. Programmers who write services choose to put common functionality on the server side and user-specific stuff on the client side because that’s the most effective solution.
2. All good mail clients filter SPAM in some way. Even Apple Mail.app filters SPAM using a relatively sophisticated algorithm. Thus the folks who do server filtering know that an additional, fine-grain, filter exists downstream from them. If they do more filtering upstream, they will make more mistakes, and users will get mad. They are incentivized by every other email client to filter out only the truly blatant SPAM, and let users handle the rest with client-side filtering.

There are other iPhone email clients, for jailbroken phones, so the market for this capability clearly exists. Why has Apple gotten the answer wrong for 5 years?

Frankly, my kids got me an iPhone for Christmas because they thought I was a luddite. I’m looking to get out of the contract because I just can’t use it to read my email and my old phone was more than good enough to talk on. I’ve been an Apple customer since the Original Mac, but this is the first Apple product that just doesn’t work.

It's not ridiculous, it's fact. Regardless of what you or anyone else want, Spam filtering IS NOT A FEATURE OF THE iPhone.

You can whine and complain all you like, it's not going to change reality.

Reality is that the iPhone is a software-based consumer device. The voice of consumers is the only thing that changes such a reality. Just agreeing with the current approach because almighty-Apple picked it is short-sighted. I mentioned that this has been broken for 5 years to make it clear that I have a long time expectation to get this changed. I just don't think I'm going to be a user that long.

Then tell Apple about it instead of whining about it here. This is a user to user support forum. Apple does not monitor it to find out what you'd like changed.

Randy Saunders wrote:

Just agreeing with the current approach because almighty-Apple picked it is short-sighted.

I must have missed the part where anyone agreed with the current approach of no spam filtering on the iPhone. All I saw was a factual statement that it does not exist at this time. I thankfully have server side filtering on my main (non-Apple) email account. It filters out hundreds of spam messages a day, though I'm still left with 20-30 to deal with myself. I have a long list of filters on my Mac that captures most of those, leaving maybe 10 to delete by hand each day. Literally 95% of the messages sent to that address are spam. Without server-side filtering, that account would be totally useless on my phone. It is painful enough to manually delete 20-30 messages a day.

Are you saying spam filtering is not technically possible within the Mail app on an IOS device? Hard for me to understand. I use Apple Mail on my laptop to read email from my 5 email addresses (IMAP, POP, gmail, etc.) and have used the built in spam filtering for years that seems to work quite well. But the incoming mail on my iPhone and iPad is so cluttered with spam that it renders those devices unusable (for email).

I've just come to the conclusion that I just have to think of those devices as being not email capable, and not even bother checking - I just wait for when I'm back at my computer to perform that function.

Strange.

Server side filtering is much more efficient. There is no need to bog down a mobile device with all the work (and extra code) of filtering spam for you when it can be done before it ever reaches your phone on 90%+ of all the mail systems out there.

If your e-mail provider doesn't offer server side spam filtering, switch to one that does. gmail, yahoo, msn, all have server side filtering. If you are using a corporate mail system, it should as well. If not, then your organization needs to remedy that.

If you have server side filters, but you are getting so much junk that it's overwhelming them and still getting through, then you need to be much more careful about who/what you give your e-mail address to.

No Kevin, it's possible. KTs position is that while possible, it isn't available. It isn't available because Apple has decided to prevent it from being provided. Software exists to filter email on the iPhone, but Apple has rejected the App Store applications because it "substantially duplicates features found in the Mail App" and it could "confuse customers". Jail-broken iPhones have client-side filtering.

One of the tradeoffs in a closed ecosystem is that you only get what Apple says you want. Your actual wants are not relevant. Apple provides server-side filtering for its email, as to gmail and others listed in this thread, and Apple has decided you want server-side filtering ONLY. That's the difference between iPhone and Android.

Makes sense, thanks. I'll have to figure out what my ISPs email is capable of.

Funny that even though I've been using Macs daily for over a quarter of a century, I find that the older I get the less patience I have for tolerating all these variations within devices. Inconsisencies in Airplay, Apple TV, IOS arghh! I guess I have to sit down and spend some time sorting through all this stuff.