Use geography to slash your spam!

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

In addition to our spam recommendations, Pobox also offers the ability to block mail by location! And now, you can block more than ever before.

We’ve recently upgraded our country list to include virtually every country and geographic region. This doesn’t block spam, this blocks all mail from that region. Here’s the idea.

You don’t know anyone who lives in Angola. Someone adds your email address to a list, for a legitimate provider or service in Angola. But, just because it’s a legitimate provider doesn’t mean you want the mail, and you don’t speak Portuguese, so you can’t figure out how to unsubscribe. By blocking all mail from geographic regions where you don’t have any correspondents, you can cut down on all types of unwanted messages.

Because it blocks all mail from that region, you should only turn on country blacklists for countries (or continents) where you don’t know anyone. In the above example, if you had a penpal in Angola, that mail would also be blocked, even though your penpal is not a spammer. Also, Blackberry is headquartered in Canada, so blocking mail from Canada can cause you to lose mail from Blackberry users. So, this is a tool to be used carefully, but that can really take a bite out of spam. (Yum!)

Try it out now from the beta version of the new index page!