Hi guys, I’m seeking your help in regards to blocking email from coming through. I use iCloud Mail on the Mac email client and iOS Mail app. I have blocked two contacts (who both have various email addresses) on my iPhone / Mac which is fine, except that when they do email me, I see it comes to my Trash OR Junk folder.
What I would like ideally, is to never even get the chance to see these emails, I want them to come right in and go right out and be unrecoverable. - Is it possible?
I tried making an Automator script that automatically deletes all the contents of my email Junk / Trash every 30 minutes or hour etc, without me needing to think about it - but I was unsuccessful. And also I know that level of control won’t be possible on iOS. Is there a correct way to do this? Grateful to hear if there is.
Right now I’m trying SaneBox (sponsor of the show is where I heard about it) and their Black Hole feature, but from what I’m reading it doesn’t exactly work how I need it to? In that the email is still seen before being moved from trash.
Any general advice is much needed. Without going into too much detail, it’s related to some therapy I’m getting and it would make a huge difference to my mental health if I didn’t even have the ability to see these emails, which can come through and throw me completely off my progress.
It seems like you need an iCloud server rule that immediately deletes the email. I am not at my Mac or iPad so I can’t look for the server rules on iCloud but, if you log into mail on iCloud.com you should be able to create a rule there which would immediately delete the email. That said, I am assuming there is an “if email from then delete” rule sequence.
Have you tried blocking each and every email address they use? It is obnoxious when people have too many email addresses. In my view usually a bad sign too. In a sense this is a problem not directly amenable to a fully automatic solution. People create new addresses to if they really want to get through to you. I do find a lot of folk use ‘trash’ as a sort of second inbox too.
@Brad Doesn’t creating a rule in the iCloud Mail App just put the unwanted email in the trash, which OP could still see in his Trash? The OP doesn’t want to see the email at all (even in the trash). OP wants the unwanted emails to be immediately deleted/removed (no longer visible). @MacExpert Same with Sanebox. OP could still see the unwanted emails in the SaneBlackhole folder or in the Trash before they are deleted.
I am not sure because the delete rule happens on the server. Thus the email should be deleted (not moved to trash) before it hits the inbox. That said, I have not tested it.
Here’s a possible solution, but I can’t test it as I don’t have the software.
SpamSieve can filter out the email for you I think (I don’t have it).
The secret sauce is a script they created that can empty the Spam folder without a pop up. They suggest running it manually, but I can’t see why it couldn’t be set to run automatically every few minutes.
Someone might be able to update this script to work without SpamSieve. If you want this approach, let me know and I’ll give it a go but I’m not so strong with AppleScript.
A more low tech, brute force method, would be to change the settings in Mail to empty the junk folder on quitting, then set a script to quit (and restart?) Mail every 30 minutes. Could get annoying though!
No problem! I hope that one of the solutions works. If the server rule solution that I noted above works, there should be no need to do anything on iOS as the email will never make it to the client and will be stopped at the server level. I will let others chime in for an iOS solution in case the sever solution does not work.
If your Mac is always on, the removal on the Mac should sync to the phone I reckon.
By the way, there’s an option on Mac to disable the trash in mail. I tested this but it doesn’t do the job of removing trash from iOS, plus it is dead simple to enable it again and see everything because all it does is hide the trash, not remove it!
