It is probably easiest to do this in the web interface.Ĭlick the cogwheel icon and select Settings, then click “Filters and blocked addresses”.

If that’s the case, you may as well tell Gmail to put everything in the Spam folder, and whitelist the 3% or so that we actually want. The tragedy of email is that most of us have no interest in around 75%-97% of the emails we receive.

If you can tame the porn spam, you might be able to salvage your email address. The instructions for iPhones and iPads are in the adjacent tab. Finally, select “Inbox type” and choose “Priority Inbox”. In the Android app, tap the hamburger menu (three horizontal lines) and then scroll down to Settings, near the end. In a browser, click the cogwheel for Settings, select “Configure Inbox” and tick all the options. If your porn-spam is moved into Promotions then it won’t be in your primary mail feed. This tells Google to pre-sort incoming emails into separate sections, such as Social, Promotions, Updates and Forums. Using Google’s “ priority inbox” should also help. It’s hard to stop idiots from spamming you, but you don’t have to look at their images. (Technically, emails that “you” supposedly requested are not spam, but we’re just trying to retrain Google’s AI.) In the smartphone app, you can select several porn emails, tap the three dots in the top right and select “Report spam”. For example, if you access Gmail from a browser, you can choose a set of pornographic emails and select the option under More to “Filter messages like these”. How does Gmail’s spam filtering block, for example, a news release about research at the University of Sheffield, from my inbox while letting porn sail through into yours? Canning spam

These include confirmation of my appointment at the London Passport Office, an editorial commission from the Guardian, a file shared by a colleague, and dozens of press releases and newsletters. I’ve been using Gmail for 15 years – it celebrated its birthday on 1 April – and it has managed to put some remarkable emails in my Spam box. Are ordinary users expected to construct their own email filter with the right keywords to divert pornographic emails to the Spam bucket, or delete them all together? However, it is apparently beyond its ability to provide an opt-in SafeSearch setting for email. Second, Google has no problem censoring pornography in its search results, even if you turn SafeSearch off.

Where is gmail spam folder