My primary email address assigned by my ISP can’t be changed. It gets a lot of spam In the past that wasn’t really a problem because I rarely used it for anything, but a few years ago I foolishly began using it on resumes. Its format is first initial + lastname @ ISP so its relatively professional. Unfortunately there are other people in the world who think that is their email address. That doesn’t help the spam problem.
I could just not check it. But I might miss important emails from my ISP.
I decided that rather than continuing to see spam on my iPhone, then subsequently opening webmail in order to report the spam that I would use GMail to pull my ISP mailbox. GMails spam filters are much more robust, and thus far I haven’t had a single false negative or false positive.
Configuring GMail to check external accounts using POP3 is easy. You can google that up if you really want to know how. During the config, you select whether to leave a copy of the message on the server. While setting this up, you can set up all mail from this account to be stored with a specific label so it doesn’t get lost in all your other Google Mail.
When I was searching for how to do this, I did see some people who caution that Google pays attention. And if don’t get that much mail, it will check less and less frequently. That isn’t an issue for me since nothing of importance occurs on that account. But it is something to be aware of.
Happy with my decision to leverage Google Mail’s spam filter against my ISP mailbox I then configured my iPhone to no longer check that account separately.
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