I have some elderly family and they keep getting into emails that are phishing scheme and causing a lot of problem.
I realize I can’t just email the President, everyone that wants to email him has to be whitelisted. Is there a email company that does this really well?
My relative is in the “in between” they have mini strokes and forget stuff , but they are super smart and start trying to do things they shouldn’t like clicking on links and trying to go through their spam folder.
Do you guys have any ideas about this( annoying spam) problem?
Interesting challenge. Most email services (e.g., Gmail) offer mail rules or filters: you should be able to configure those to say if a message I've received is not from my contacts, put it in [spam/archive/review folder].
Fastmail in particular offers mail rules that work with contact groups. I use those and add contacts to groups like “screened,” “reads,” “info”, etc., which sends messages to particular folders on receipt.
It would seem that such a rule might not be sufficient in this case.
An extreme solution might be to have your relative’s mail redirected to to you, and then you forward only the safe items to them. Labor intensive, and I’m not sure how you would go about it. (And this is likely the way most email to the president it handled, it is routed to a staffer, who deals with it.)
Some smart developer could make a fortune solving this problem. Sort of like the Jitterbug phone, but for email.
In the meantime, what if you signed them up for one of those annoying (to email marketers) services that requires a small fee to deliver email to the recipient?
Make them a new email address. Set up forwarding from their existing address, but set up all the forwards as rules for individual email addresses (as you encounter and approve them) to make a whitelist. Lock them out of their current email address and let the family know their new address (and make sure they never give out the new address beyond that, heh.)
How many “whitelisted” addresses would you need? If you are willing to do some experimentation, I’m thinking you might be able to create one rule to file most messages:
I’ve not found a limit of the number of addresses and/or domains, separated by OR, that I can include in a rule. Right now I have one rule with 30 addresses.
Every unknown sender needs to be „screened“. Only the positive screened senders Mails go to your „Imbox“.
I setup something similar on fastmail using the contacts, what was just mentioned.
All mail from known contacts are moved to my „Imbox“ everything else is waiting in the Imbox to be screened and maybe blocked.
Can anyone share their experience with Inbox Shield? Except for the monthly expense, this sounds perfect for my 95-year-old Dad. It’s not clear to me what one would get for the $7 one-off payment.