What's the best way to prevent email from a specific person from showing up in my inbox?

August 14, 2005 1:32 PM

What's the best way to prevent email from a specific person from showing up in my inbox?

FWIW: I buy hosting from textdrive and use apple mail for a client.

posted by rschroed to computers & internet (13 comments total)

Flag them as spam, set up a rule to "move all messages from to trash," set up a rule to bounce email to sender. Any, or all will do.
posted by sdrawkcab at 1:36 PM on August 14, 2005

To be more clear: In Apple Mail, go to the 'Mail' menu and select 'Preferences.' When the preference pane comes up, select 'Rules'.

Press 'Add rule', then make a rule to detect all mail with in the From: field. You can then set Mail to throw that person's mail out, put it in Junk, put it in the Trash, put it in a specific box, or whatever.
posted by ikkyu2 at 1:42 PM on August 14, 2005

Er, a rule to detect all mail with <specific person> in the From: field.

Silly entities, corrupting my posts.
posted by ikkyu2 at 1:43 PM on August 14, 2005

Any way to accomplish the same server-side? I'd prefer the messages not be downloaded at all.
posted by rschroed at 1:59 PM on August 14, 2005

See if your hosting provider uses spamassassin or some such on the server. You can possibly send spam to dev/null on the server depending on what they provide and how easily customizable they make it.
posted by matildaben at 4:18 PM on August 14, 2005

If you have a Textdrive account with shell access, you can set up a very simple procmail script that lives in your home directory and sends all mail from [e-mail] right straight to /dev/null. This also becomes a great way to make disposable addresses if you have a hosted domain. You can create a one-time address, use it for whatever purpose you want, and then send anything addressed to [e-mail] right to /dev/null. The Textdrive forums talk about procmail here
posted by jessamyn at 4:26 PM on August 14, 2005

As others have said, you can use spam filtering (or procmail rules if you have access to the shell) to filter out messages that match a specific pattern (e.g. a certain e-mail address on the from line).

But avoiding mail from a specific person can be more difficult. They could easily get a new e-mail address, for example.
posted by winston at 4:32 PM on August 14, 2005

I'm with Fastmail.fm, who employ an amazing server-side program called Sieve that lets you set up simple (or, if you prefer, incredibly complex) rules for how to treat all your mail. The basic GUI interface lets you easily add "To:" "From:" "Subject:" "All Headers" "Spam Score >=" etc. rules of your own.

With a bit more fu on your part, Sieve can bounce email back to that specific sender with a highly customized message, if you like that kind of thing. It can also just send it to /dev/null/ "silently," so the person/robot has no idea you never even received their message (a fave of mine).

Here's some sample Sieve scripts to give you some flavor for the high end usage.
posted by merlinmann at 4:34 PM on August 14, 2005

Jessamyn's got it right. One thing to know, though: /dev/null is forever. If you forward messages to /dev/null, they cannot be retrieved, even by your hosting company. For my money, procmail is second only to mod_rewrite in terms of how badly it can screw up your life.
posted by gleuschk at 4:56 PM on August 14, 2005

I've found that it takes a certain level of unix sophistication (which I don't have) to write procmail rules. Some ISPs will provide a more user-friendly front-end to spamassassin, however, where you can create your own rules, but not with the granularity that writing your own .procmailrc offers.
posted by matildaben at 5:11 PM on August 14, 2005

One thing to know, though: /dev/null is forever.

Yeah, if you are at the point where you just can not handle seeing another message from [e-mail] procmail is maybe not your best plan. Usually I set it up to filter into a spambox and if the script seems to be working okay, then I reset it to send the mail to /dev/null as a second step.
posted by jessamyn at 5:49 PM on August 14, 2005

Don't be an AOLer and report something that is not spam as spam. Set up a filtering rule to delete it. Reporting non-spam as spam just pollutes blocklists. (Ask any company that sends on leigitmate mailing lists about idiot AOLers that think "report as spam" means "delete" and use it on things that they knowingly signed up for.)
posted by Rhomboid at 9:50 PM on August 14, 2005

Another vote for not reporting non-spam as spam. Doing so decreases the efficacy of your spam filters and makes false positives more likely.

Just use the rules in the apple mail client... they can do pretty much everything that procmail and sieve can do.
posted by mosch at 9:57 AM on August 16, 2005