Spammers use different aliases and email addresses every day, so the extremely simplified blacklisting process used by eM Client is inadequate.
Can you please consider hiring a few people to work on adding active spam filtering to your product? I get hundreds of spam messages a day now… when I used thunderbird it filtered about 90% of the daily spam effectively.
I see this problem with eM Client being the only impediment to your program becoming a top ranked essential product.
Hi Michael thank you for you constructive criticism and thank you for the suggestion, we’ll consider improving this for future releases.
Best regards,
Paul.
Why not create your own filter on words like “unsubscribe”… will eliminate a lot already
Hi Michael,
Wouldn’t it be better to have spam filtering on your e-mail server? Then those spam messages won’t be downloaded to your computer and if you change your e-mail client, the filtering will still be active.
I’ve read positive replies of other users on this forum about spamihilator working together with eM Client.
No, it would not be better.
The problem with having spam handled by your email server is that some items that are not spam find their way into the spam folder. The only way to see these items would be to log into your email server to see the spam, and to mark it as “not spam” if necessary. To do this multiple times on a daily basis would be time consuming.
If I wanted to do that, I wouldn’t use an email client… I could just use Horde, directly by logging into the server to see my email. The reason people use an email client is so that they do not have to log into their server each time they want to check email.
By having active email filtering on my client, I can see the messages as they download… and I can teach the the client what is spam, and what is not.
Hi Michael, what you’re describing sounds like what the blacklist feature is already doing.
If you have a spam filtering system on your server and if some messages find a way into your inbox (or more like the spam filtering system is not able to mark these messages as spam), you can use the “Move to junk” feature and either blacklist the domain or the email address, next time you receive such message it should not be visible in your inbox.
Please note having a spamfilter that would work on a set base of rules would not affect emails received by the server, so if you’re using another device possibly and would download new messages without using eM Client (your phone for example), the message would still be received by the server, e.g. your inbox, and would not be moved to junk.
Thank you for understanding,
Paul.
No, the blacklisting “feature” is essentially useless for spam. As I said in my original post… spammers use different email addresses (thus different domains) every time they spam. Blacklisting works to block legitimate companies from sending annoying sales messages, but I can unsubscribe from those anyway, if they are a legitimate company.
I DO NOT use spam filtering on my server… I work in an advertising agency, and cannot afford to accidentally have a clients email wind up in my spam folder on the server, and not be passed into my inbox for examination.
Active spam filtering on my EMAIL CLIENTensures that I have the ability to check my spam folder for messages that need to be white-listed.
i just downloaded em client, got some of it set up and suddenly, i have 100x the spam i had with my previous product, The Bat, as it has a add-on spam filter that’s quite reliable… i wanted em client for ms exchange, but as much as i like this, without any spam filtering, something almost every email client has either built in or as an add-on, wouldn’t matter if it was paid or free, it has one.
this is a deal breaker for me, as i get hundreds of spam, and while you say add a server side filter, we have one, but spam still gets thru, but more importantly, some real mail doesn’t and that’s the biggest problem… at least if it’s in the junk mail box, it can be manually reviewed to check if anything important gets in.
regardless, i had high hopes for em client, but for me, this is a huge and unforgivable fail.
will be requesting a refund… when you add a real spam filter, let me know and i’ll sign up…
thanks
Hi Michael and Marty,
Did you try ‘spamihilator’ as I’ve suggested in one of my posts above?
That’s a spam filter which should work locally with eM Client.
i tried it and could not get it to work with em client… sorry…
Marty, I find your problem very important, but I have a much better suggestion for eM Client guys: make a way that emails received are recognized in the client as SPAM, so that you and I can use the gmail or other email very sophisticated spam filters but not loose any emails, since they would all be downloaded to the client in the correct SPAM folder so you could check if there’s any good email in it. This is already possible with IMAP but I don’t want to use IMAP, so I’m asking for this.
the problems with your idea is simple enough. There aren’t enough filters in the universe to stop spam with a filter. spammers constantly change their servers, and how they hide their identities… the concept of user created filters is impossible for that reason. The Baysian spam theory is a fluid method of constantly learning what spam looks like and how it evolves and over time, the Baysian filters actually learn what to expect. We can’t possibly be able to monitor mail coming in from a million different sources and add filters every time the spam changes a little.
The bottom line is the best email clients have filters, and have the options to add one… i’ve been using The Bat by RIT for years and it’s great, but they don’t offer native exchange mail so i went to em client for that reason alone. Even Thunderbird, which is totally free has an option to add a spam filter, also free, but that program has problems of it’s own. The potential of em becoming the best email client available for windows is certainly there, but until they understand and accept that it is a responsibility to add spam options, doesn’t even have to be free, but add options to allow it, em will never be the world class product it can be.
They don’t even have to reinvent the wheel. just add the abilty to add a spam client as an add-on and let developers build them for em, they just add the space to add it… they don’t need to know how they work, just allow it to be added in.
There are good points to em that i like but ultimately, i still feel The Bat is better for some things and EM for others… maybe they should buy The Bat and merge the 2 and have one kick butt mail program. 
Marty you didn’t understand, perhaps because english is my second. There’s no way to compare gmail spam filters with other spam filters, I mean, gmail probably is the best one, since gmail is used by billions of people and google has thousands of people working in gmail. If you use IMAP would solve your problem, because all the emails would be filtered by gmail BUT YOU WOULD STILL BE ABLE TO CHECK THE SPAM FILTER in eM program itself. do you get that? problem is that I DON’T WANT to use IMAP, I like pop3 simplicity better. So what I would need the team to do is make a way that messages recognized as SPAM by gmail are put in the TRASH or SPAM folder in eM so I could filter them myself too.
ok, well, you do what you like… im not using gmail to filter my mail.
I understand that, but I believe sooner or later you will need to change that. But still use your desktop client.
I have a interesting situation with eM Client. I use it to read two different mail accounts (completely different domains, servers, IPs - I’m not sure how to say it but one is @hereabear.com and one is @gtpcperth.com - one is personal on my wife’s domain and one is assigned from work).
This summer when I used auto responders on both as I went on vacation, I returned to find both swimming with spam. I used Rules, Blacklists, etc. and it worked for one account and not the other.
The one that didn’t work is work’s and I still receive 40+ spams a day. That provider uses Apache Spam Assissin, enabled, filtered, etc…
Can you offer any help or direction from within eM Client?
You know, I use gMail. But I also have other mail accounts. Presuming gMail span filtering is the final solution is simply naive.
Exactly… can’t depend on another platform to conduct spam filtering on business mail and lose all security on it with a 3rd party. Besides, em client also shows a lack of incite when they simply put something as important as spam filtering as no more important or relevant than being ‘under consideration’. In the modern world, spam is real, spam is pervasive and spam is not going away. For em client to address it like it’s insignificant and unimportant is shortsighted and ignorant.
Spam filtering should have been on the list of essential must-have items when they started designing this product and instead gave it a ridiculous low ranking of importance. em client is good, but until they add things like spam filtration and more flexibility in their options, it’ll never be a great mail client. But they’ll respond and explain they are thinking about it and thank us for understanding they don’t feel like bothering with it.
Personally, I would rather not see eM Client bloated with spam filtering. I too, believe that should be handled server side. It does a far better job.
I run IceWarp server on a NAS, and see no spam entering my inbox at all. Known spammers don’t even get a chance to dump spam, as they are actively refused connections. It runs a combination of DNSBL, SpamAssassin, and Bayesian, and literally nothing gets through.
Anything that may be borderline gets accepted, and dumped in a quarantine area. Once a day the server runs a report, and if anything exists in the quarantine or Junk folders, it sends the user an email listing those. Simply click a button in the email to whitelist it or mark it as spam.
If you are running a server and it’s not doing it’s job correctly in some way, I would suggest looking at the settings in depth and setting it up correctly. It’s a far better way to combat spam than messing about with it on a client.
Ok, so you may think IceWarp is a bit too expensive for you. No worries, another server called ‘Xeams’ does the same job as described above. And it’s totally free open source. It can also be set up solely as a spam server, and is very lightweight.
Apart from that, it can also pick up all your mail from various locations and run them all through the same filter. Worth checking out. 
I don’t think so … Every user have own set of spam. For example our users have problem with russian and chinese spams. But exists some users, who communicate with this countries on daily basis.
Solution? Basic server-side filtering with low settings. And rest of work move to clients - for example by SpamBayes.
Server have many&many other work to do … Spam filtering is too CPU expensive.But on clients? More CPU power for one e-mail message