The Wonderful World of Emailed Reports

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

I love Pobox spam protection, and I think it’s wonderfully accurate. Still, I do identify with Ronald Reagan. Trust, but verify. And getting an emailed spam report every day makes that really easy.

The emailed report provides a list of all the messages the spam filters have picked up for my account since the last report 24 hours ago (approximately). You can get a report that includes both the messages we’ve held for you, and the sending addresses of everyone who’s been bounced. But I use the Aggressive pre-set, so the only messages that are bounced are the ones that we’re really confident were spam. So, I set my report to only include the held messages, which makes it easier to review (read: shorter.) The emailed report also has a “Mark This Report Reviewed” button, which lets you delete all the messages in that report, right from your Inbox!

Unfortunately for some users, if your ISP uses content filters (like Comcast), you may end up finding your emailed report in your Spam or Junk Mail folder. That makes sense – it is a report full of the email addresses and subjects of spam! While having a list is great, some people also just like having a daily reminder to go have a look at the spam we’ve picked up. So, we’re testing out an emailed summary report. It doesn’t have a list of all the messages, just a note about how many messages we’ve picked up, and a button to go check it out on the web. If you’d like to be part of our tester group, just contact Customer Support, and tell us that you want to switch your emailed reports to the summary version!

If you want to keep an up-to-the-minute eye on your spam, you can also get an RSS feed of your messages! That’s customized per-person, so I can’t give you a link, but head over to the Spam section if you want to grab one. The feeds are customized per view, so you can subscribe to just the view you want to see.

And, of course, some people are happy just knowing the Spam section is there if they need it, but don’t need to be reminded just how many people in the world want to sell them a degree. (Only 10 this month, thank you!) If that’s you, you can turn off your emailed reports at any time. Please don’t report them as spam. That can cause your ISP to think they are spam, and other Pobox customers who do want them may not see them.

Signing off from snowy Philadelphia – I hope all of you East Coast residents stay warm!