Defeating BlackBerry Spam

I hate Spam. In the last few years, as the volume of unwanted messages has increased, Spam has mutated from a minor annoyance to a real impediment to productivity. Spam is particularly annoying on a BlackBerry because it is a much more intimate device than a PC. We carry our BlackBerries with us, inviting that intrusive little buzz of a new email into our lives as we venture away from the office.

If you are using the BlackBerry Enterprise Server for your email, then you probably already have some Spam filters set up by your administrator. There are a number of software packages that will filter out Spam before it gets sent to your BlackBerry.

If you aren’t a BES user, you are probably forwarding your email from your other accounts. Rather than forward all the email from those account directly to your BlackBerry, consider forwarding those emails to a Gmail account instead. Then configure that Gmail account to forward to your BlackBerry. This way you can take advantage of Gmail’s Spam filters, and you have a 2GB archive of all emails sent to your BlackBerry.

In addition to server side solutions, you can also use email filtering on your BlackBerry to get rid of some Spam. To create a filter, start up the Messages application. From the thumbwheel menu select Options > Email Filters

Message Options - Email filters

Then select “New” to create a new filter. You can enter search strings for To, From, Subject, and Message.

Creating a new filter

You could create a filter to search for terms in the Subject or Body fields of an email and automatically restrict those messages. This can eliminate a good bit of Spam, although you may be continually updating the filters to keep up with the creative spelling that Spammers use. V1aGrA anyone?

Email filter options

Newly Created Filter

You can also create a filter to only let in email from certain domains. You can search for a string in the From field such as “@domain.com”. You might use this to only let in emails from your Gmail account, insuring that you only receive emails that have passed through a Spam filter.


## This Article Was Originally Published by AllBlackBerry.com on July 11, 2006