Spam section improvement: automatically trust senders

This article was originally published as part of the Pobox blog. Pobox was acquired by Fastmail in 2015.

Today, we’re reviving an old feature. When you release mail from the Spam section, you can automatically trust the sender, instead of being asked whether or not you want to trust it.

The next time you release a message, we’ll ask you if you want to confirm senders when you release mail in the future. Or, if you don’t want to wait, you can set Trust on Spam Release to “always add the address as trusted” on the Trusted Senders page.

Trusted Senders have always been part of our spam filters.  In the earliest version, it was a “secret feature” – you couldn’t view, edit, delete or add addresses to trust. You had a limited window in which you could tell us not to trust someone, and from then on, we handled it for you.

When we made Trusted Senders editable, we also made the system always add new senders when you released a message, thinking that you could always delete them if it turned out you had accidentally released spam. Easy when accounts only had the 20-50 Trusted Senders added by releasing messages; not so easy when people eagerly started uploading their address books.  Especially problematic, the only view of Trusted Senders was an alphabetical list.  So, we stopped automatically trusting addresses, and took you to a confirmation page again.

We changed Trusted Senders last year to let you sort them by when you added them. But the original reason why people wanted that, to be able to find newly added senders and delete them if they were spammers,  was left behind… until now.

Thank you to all the customers who gave feedback on this (and other elements of Pobox.) In most cases, what annoys you about our website also annoys us. Your comments give us a chance to explain why things work the way they do. And, sometimes, those explanations remind us that they don’t need to work that way any more!