Is it possible to reject emails rather than sending them to spam?

[zappaDPJ]

Due to a number of data breaches my main email address attracts a massive amount of spam. During the last few months the majority of it written in Japanese originates from .cn.

As every email is sent from a disposable address it's pointless marking it as spam and it would be equally pointless blocking the domain as I would still have to check the spam folder for genuine mail.

Is there anyway at all of rejecting an entire domain or at least sending it to a unique folder?

[Simon]

Assuming this is an IDNet email, if you log in to the Customer Portal, find the settings for your email, you can create custom filters for just about every imaginable trigger.  By using * as a wildcard you can ban a whole domain or any such other configuration, and you can set it to immediately delete without going into a spam folder. 

[zappaDPJ]

Thanks that's exactly what I want. I'll give it a go

[nowster]

Theoretically it's possible to cause an email to be rejected when the remote server tries to deliver it, but that also has the potential of causing problems, and it's dangerous for an ISP to offer that facility.

For my own personal email server, the spam classifier software (spamassassin) has to give a very high spamminess score to an email for the mail server (exim4) to reject delivery outright rather than file it in the junk folder.

[zappaDPJ]

For my own personal email server

I think I'm going to have to bite the bullet and go down that road. I logged into IDNet's webmail, something I very rarely do only to find an entire 24 hours worth of unread emails (251) sitting in Trash.

Assuming this is an IDNet email, if you log in to the Customer Portal, find the settings for your email, you can create custom filters for just about every imaginable trigger.

Any idea what I would enter as the header to ban .cn? I have no idea what I'm doing here

[Simon]

I think you'd enter *.cn in the From field, assuming the .cn is like .com and you wanted to block all .coms.  If it's something like joe bloggs @ xyz . cn, then you'd enter *@xyz . cn (without the spaces, again in the From field. 

I've had them work either with or without the @ and/or the *, so you can try different combinations until one works. 

[zappaDPJ]

So I would leave the header field blank?

[Simon]

I guess you could do either, or both.  I usually just use the From field. 

[nowster]

I think I'm going to have to bite the bullet and go down that road.

Running your own mail server is not for the faint hearted these days.

[zappaDPJ]

Running your own mail server is not for the faint hearted these days.

That's probably why my brain shuts down every time I begin to think about it

[zappaDPJ]

It seems I really don't know what I'm doing. I've tried everything I can think of, even *.* but everything I've tried is completely ignored.

I have managed to redirect everything .cn to Junk locally using Outlook 365 which was easy enough but I've had to admit defeat as far as the customer dashboard is concerned.

[Simon]

Apologies, I seem to have given you some wrong information, as I've just noticed it says wildcards (*) don't work.  I don't know if that's always been the case and I've never noticed before, or whether it's been changed at some point.  Anyway, when you log into the customer portal, you should see your email settings:



Then you click Filters and scroll down to Advanced Filters:



From there you scroll down to Create Custom Rule and set the fields as below, and it should work. 

[zappaDPJ]

Thanks Simon. Things tend to look slightly different on a PC but I don't recall seeing that message at the bottom of your last screenshot and it looks rather hard to miss.

I'll take another stab at it.

[zappaDPJ]

Switching browsers from Brave to Firefox brought up a page similar to what @Simon posted above and I was able to enter the suggested data which appears to have worked so thanks for that

[Simon]

Glad to help.  Eventually!