Like many people, I’ve been pushed into a pattern of using multiple devices instead of one personal computer, and that in turn has pushed me towards webmail.
Before that, I used Eudora, which I initially embraced because of its powerful filtering tools. I could construct filters like IF emailaccount="ahunter3@isp.org" AND To: Header ≠ “ahunter3@isp.org” AND From: Header DOES NOT MATCH LIST “AddressBook1” AND EmailBody CONTAINS ANY IN LIST “SpamPhrases” THEN Move to ProbablyTrash with label “CC or BCC” AND Don’t Play New Message Sound AND Continue Applying Subsequent Filters
(That’s not quite the nomenclature but you get the general idea.)
Now that I’m pretty much forced to use webmail a good portion of the time, the spam is overwhelming and my ISP’s server-side filtering tools suck. I only have the choices of banning individual senders’ email addresses, banning entire domains, or quarantining every single email whose sender isn’t in my address book into “Likely Spam” which I then have to comb through if I ever want anyone I don’t already correspond with to send me a legitimate email.
Question (finally): are there 3rd party tools that individuals can use to filter their personal email inboxes on the server (i.e., ISP) side? I’ve Googled but all the products I’m led to turn out to be for large organizations and most of them with a “we’ll just AI all your email and toss the spam, you don’t have to worry your pretty head about defining what is and what is not spam” kind of approach.
Other relevant info: I don’t want to switch ISPs or switch to a different email address.
I think you’re stuck fighting an uphill battle here, because spam filters and rules usually run on the server (especially the good ones that can look at patterns across an entire ISP, not just your own messages). But if your ISP webmail sucks and they don’t want to improve it, your options are really limited…
Maybe you can try something like https://www.make.com/en/integrations/email where it scans your emails periodically and then labels/moves/deletes them according to the rules you set up. This is a very very tedious way to automate email processing, though. I mean, it’s already an uphill battle to have to manually define rules one by one in Eudora or Thunderbird; having to do so in an automation tool like Make.com is even more tedious because it’s not really made specifically for email, just general workflow automations.
An easier to use version of that would be to just keep Thunderbird (or Eudora if you prefer) running 24/7 on a computer and set it up to use IMAP. As soon as it receives mail it can filter it and sync the changes back to the server (that’s what IMAP is) so the results of that filtering should be reflected everywhere, even if the actual process of that filtering took place on your computer.
Otherwise, sorry… hate to say it, but it’s really this:
Gmail (in particular) was so good at spam filtering and webmail that it killed the entire home email industry. There’s nobody making good software for ISP email anymore because most people don’t use that anymore. You’re left with the super niche cases and the old, difficult to use software =/
If you have an Android phone, there are also apps like https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.faircode.email&hl=en_US that might be able to do the same kind of clientside filtering + IMAP syncing that Thunderbird on a computer would do. It’d just run on your phone instead of your computer. But it’d probably also affect your battery life and possibly data usage if you have it poll too often.
You might look at em Client as your email client. It runs on multiple platforms. I recently downloaded it and installed it for my wife, who has both Yahoo and Gmail accounts, and it seems to work quite well. The interface looks a lot like Outlook, and it interfaces nicely with Google contacts and calendar.
A caveat, however: Setting up a filter on a Windows machine is local to that machine, so if you create a filter on your laptop, you would need to also create it on your phone or other device. Which may defeat your goal.
That would be okay if it can filter the messages that are held on server. But honestly at this point I’m thinking of just using Eudora to filter IMAP mail, as Reply suggested upthread.
I don’t think anything can filter mail on the server without your ISP’s cooperation — that’s the difficulty here. The “real” serverside spam filters run on the server itself, processing email as soon as it’s received (often before it even lands in your individual inbox). You can’t really “fake” that with your own third-party apps unless your ISP specifically allows it.
For example, there is something called a sieve script which allows you, the user, to define a set of filtering rules to be run on their servers. But I know of vanishingly few mail providers who actually support this — from a casual search, Fastmail and ProtonMail seem to be two (they are some of the bigger “second-tier” webmail services), but I doubt most home ISP mail services would. You can ask, but I wouldn’t keep my hopes up. It’s very likely whoever you ask would have never even heard of this technology.
Otherwise, clientside filtering with your own email app is the best you could do. And it would necessarily be, well, clientside. But at least IMAP syncs the deletions (not the filters) back up to the server so your other devices don’t see those messages.
I would say that, in general, if you want this level of control over your email, you can only really guarantee that by owning your own domain name, like a@hunter3.com. Then you can host that with any mail provider you want, using user-definable spam filtering as a criterion (e.g. FastMail and Proton can let you use your own email domains). This is the only way you have anything approximating true ownership of your address, and as much filtering and configuration as your heart desires (it can a rabbit hole, though, fraught with “footguns” and deliverability issues… not for the faint of heart or short of time).
However, that’s largely precluded by this:
If your email address is currently youremail@yourisp.com, you’re pretty fucked. Clientside filtering is the only thing you can do.
I figured out a solution and I don’t even have to use IMAP!
I found a setting in Eudora filter options that I’ve never had reason to use before. “Server options”, one of which is to immediately delete a message from the server.
Eudora can delete messages from the server immediately after downloading them as POP mail, but I have my general account settings configured to leave messages on the server for 24 hours — otherwise web mail would be pretty useless — I’d have to run downstairs several times a day to see if any important emails had come in and been downloaded and deleted before I saw it in web mail.
But with this filter option that I’ve rediscovered, I have Eudora filtering POP mail as it downloads it, and the emails matching the parameters of the spam explosion I’ve been experiencing get transferred to a special BookSpam folder and the email is immediately deleted from the server so I don’t get annoyed by seeing it in web mail
Another alternative that seems similarly difficult: 