How well does Blackberry handle junk/spam/unimportant emails?

Hi,

I do not own nor have ever used a BB, but I am considering changing my service provider and purchasing either a Curve or a Pearl. To ease your reading, I've bolded my main questions.

I would mainly be using BIS services. (However, I am starting work next summer and they may have BES... They do not give out/pay for BB for entry-levels such as myself, but they most likely have BES services.. is it easy/possible to switch from BIS to BES or do I need to get entirely new hardware?)

I have 2 emails I use quite frequently... one is Gmail and one is a school-provided email. (I assume that with BIS I will be able to configure the POP required for the school provided email?)... however, I tend to have a lot of junk (read: unimportant, not necessarily spam) emails on both of them.

I typically try and delete as many as I can, but typically I just leave unimportant emails unread (eg. I have over 700 unread emails in both of my accounts).

My question is, how well does BB handle these junk emails? How do you guys deal with your unimportant emails?

I could imagine random buzzing from my BB every hour to some unimportant email very irritating after a while...Do I just have to get into the habit of deleting them every time they pop up or is there some sort of BB-side smart-filter? How easy is it to delete unwanted email?

Any tips on how you guys handle your not-spam-but-not-important-emails being pushed to your BBs?

Thanks so much from a newbie/prospective addict!

GMail is at present the best at filtering spam and junk emails. BIS/BES is a function, and thus has nothing to do with the BlackBerry hardware, per se'...

I know what you mean about the unimportant email situation. I have an email I've been using for about 10 yrs. Its been around the net so I get a lot of nonsense emails. I just delete them as they come. I'm sure there might be an app out there or just some filters are needed, but its not really that big of an issue for me. Honestly I'm still fascinated with my Curve having had it for about 3 weeks, so I enjoy any little alert or message, lol.

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

There is no hardware change required to move from BIS to BES, but the is a data plan change that your carrier will need to make for you.

You should be able to configure your POP account...if you can configure it to work with a computer based email through pop settings while off campus, then the BIS service should be able to access it too.

The BB doesn't "handle" junk email....it makes no decission on the type of email...what ever it sees in your inbox, you'll get on your BB...period.

To solve this, increase your junk filtering client (gmail) side, or set up rules to filter them to sub-folders.

I would suggest a change of lifestyle, perhaps. Back when I started doing lots of stuff on the internets, I did one thing. I started using my yahoo address for anything that I had to enter an email address for. This included, posting to USENet, which I used [email protected] for my email address.

After a few years, I moved out of state (since that time). When I returned, my main email address name was still available on RR. Within two days of having it, I realized that it got listed somewhere as I was recieving all kinds of crap on an hourly basis.

To sum it up, I turned that email alias into my 'spam trap'. I have it set up to check through yahoo mail and do not have it entered into my mail client. I, also, use that email address for all online transactions, signups etc... So, all I have to do is once a week log into mail.yahoo.com, click the link for that mailbox and empty it out of all the spam and find the important emails.

This leaves my MAIN email address spam free and the only time I get 'buzzed' with email is when it's from a friend or relative.

However, I'm sure you'll do whatever works for you.

Thanks so much guys, you answered all of my questions!

Sure do know how to make a new guy feel welcome:P

We have a SPAM filter that puts junk mail into a junk folder for Outlook but the Blackberry receives ALL emails, including the SPAM into the messages folder - is there a way of not receiving these junk emails onto the Blackberry?

Just go to your BIS account on blackberry.com and you can set filters by giving keywords that you get spam from and they will not get sent to your handheld

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

Antair makes one BB spam filter. I have never tried it and cannot attest to it.