Blacklists and Whitelists

Does eM Client support any sort of Blacklist / Whitelist entries? This would be an awesome addition if not to help curb the amount of spam I see.

No, eM client doesn’t support such functionality. Spams are usually detected by spam filter on the server. In eM Client you can create rule for sorting mails to different folders or trash.

As you know, spam these days is so much more likely to use random email addresses or domain names, or in a lot of cases, use an innocent third-party domain for delivering their messages. Of course there are many approaches to handling this, with a combination of keyword filtering and other methods.

However, the current approach to spam in eM Client seems futile at best: Marking a message as Junk and then answering the question “do you also want to blacklist the email or blacklist the domain?” is hopeless because the odds that you’re going to receive even one more piece of spam from that now blacklisted email or domain is almost zero (to be fair, there are still a few old-school spammers that will be foiled this way, but not representative of the majority). So if you regularly do this and mark messages that inevitably end up in your inbox as spam and blacklist their email/domain, after a few weeks or even years, your spam rule is going to contain hundreds or even thousands of addresses and domains – and I’m willing to bet you’re not going to get another message from 90% of these addresses – so you end up with a spam filter where only 10% of the conditions in the rule are being used.

For the last few years I’ve used a whitelist add-on to Outlook Express, called Qurb. It integrates seamlessly into OE, by adding 3 buttons to my menu bar and a quarantine folder next to my spam folder. What it does is automatically move anything not on my approved senders “whitelist” into this quarantine folder. Anyone already on my contact list is in the whitelist, anyone that I send an email to is also automatically added to the whitelist. I can fine-tune it by clicking either Approve or Block to any message in my email (Approve adds that address to my whitelist, Block removes it). And then whenever I choose, I can click the quarantine button and a special dialog box opens that just shows me a simplified list of only the most recently quarantined messages with their name, email, subject and date, and I can hover over each message and it will show me first 256 characters of the messages body as a tooltip, and then to the left of each message is a column with checkboxes, so that I can click to check any messages that shouldn’t be in there and when I click OK on the quarantine box, any messages that I clicked will be automatically whitelisted and moved to my Inbox – I can’t tell you how amazing this is. The quarantine box even tells me how many messages it’s kept from my inbox: it’s quarantined 36,000 messages since 2006! I can’t imagine having to click “Move to Junk” for that many messages.

I would love to see eM Client have similar functionality. Add a Spam tab to the preferences and then give us the options: Whitelist my email by only allowing messages from senders I trust to land in my Inbox; everyone else goes to a special folder for later inspection and approval.

I cannot emphasize this enough: Blacklisting is a very “active”, tedious activity that requires constant vigilance; Whitelisting on the other hand is the path of least resistance, very easy, “passive” activity that you don’t have to think about. While I do have a mail server that does more aggressive spam filtering that removes 90% of my spam problems, I still get maybe a dozen or so spam messages a day that still make it through, but that doesn’t mean that I still want to see them in my Inbox.

We plan to finally implement some kind of Whitelist in one of the next updates.

Great news! :slight_smile: