Email Spam on your Blackberry – How to Block It

Written by: Ryan Tetzlaff • Edited by: Bill Bunter
Updated Feb 21, 2011 • Related Guides: Email | Blackberry

When you have a Blackberry, not only do you get standard phone features such as SMS, you also have the luxury of receiving email on your phone. Where there’s email, SPAM is sure to follow. What can you do to stop receiving SPAM or to avoid SPAM in the first place? Read on to find out.

Blocking SMS Spam

Blackberry smart phones are wildly popular – especially in business environments, but as is the case with any email account, Blackberry devices are prone to SPAM. The devices – as useful as they are – are prone to both SMS or Text Message and regular email SPAM.

Unfortunately, due to the nature of how the SMS protocol works, blocking SMS SPAM is quite difficult.Spammers will use automated systems to scan public websites looking specifically for phone numbers. They'll then start sending text message SPAM to those phone numbers. Since SMS messages are sent directly from your phone carrier (AT&T, Verizon, etc.) to your phone, there is no way to block them before arriving on your phone. This especially bad if you have to pay per text message received.

The biggest thing in combating SMS SPAM is to not get it in the first place. Never post your cell phone number to any public forum, website or social site. You can read more about SMS SPAM here: Text Messaging Spam – What is it?

The other vector for receiving SPAM is via the Blackberry email feature.

Blocking Email SPAM on your Blackberry

Luckily, blocking email SPAM on your Blackberry is much easier than blocking SMS SPAM.

If you are using your Blackberry as part of your business environment, there isn’t much you’ll need to do assuming your business has a SPAM filter in place already. What if you don’t have a SPAM filter in place or you use your ISP for receiving email on your Blackberry? There’s still hope.

Since Blackberry mail is relayed to your phone from another source, you can set up a filter in between your ISP and the Blackberry. The most common way of doing this is to use the Blackberry Desktop to synchronize email from a mail client such as Outlook to your phone. Installing a free SPAM filter such as Spamihilator will block email on both your computer and Blackberry.

Other free SPAM filters can be found discussed in my article on the Top 3 Free SPAM Filters for Windows.

With these few tips, you don’t have to put up with loads of SPAM on your phone.