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Old 6 Sep 2019, 12:11 AM   #1
NJSS
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Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: Hampshire, UK
Posts: 1,238
Help ! Fastmail & POBox.com - Blocking emails

Sorry - I'm very stressed and away from home.

I am being harassed by someone & I need guidance as how best to deal with this. The person in question has 2 or 3 email addresses & is emailing me at my POBox.Com address which forwards to FM.

Ideally I would like in the first instance to "block"all emails from this person.

If they continue to email me I would like to generate an automatic response, along the lines of "All emails from you to me are being bounced - you might as well desist from sending me emails".

Normally I could sort this myself, but great stress at present & solutions would be most welcome.

NJSS
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Old 6 Sep 2019, 01:38 AM   #2
jdmyers
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Join Date: Sep 2017
Posts: 9
If you just want to completely block them, just go into your FM settings and under rules, create a new rule to permanently delete any email that comes in from those particular email addresses. If they keep adding more addresses they email you from, then you might have to modify things by adding conditions based on other factors, message content, etc.
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Old 6 Sep 2019, 04:54 AM   #3
xyzzy
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It's hard to believe those sender addresses are anything useful so sending a auto response to them is probably useless. Doing the discard as mentioned above is probably your best solution.
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Old 6 Sep 2019, 05:24 AM   #4
n5bb
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Arrow In most cases, don’t automatically respond or delete messages

When viewing any of those messages in the Fastmail app or website, use the vertical ellipsis (three vertical dot) Action tool to Add Rule from Message. You can then set up your rule based on one of the actual messages. If it’s sent from more than one From address, do this on messages sent from each From sender address. Just be sure not to block all messages sent from POBox!

My suggestion is to initially set up a special folder (with an Auto-purge setting of 7 days) and build your rules to move these messages automatically to that folder (rather then immediately delete them). Look at that folder at least once a week and be sure that no desirable messages are being accidentally placed in the folder. This is much safer than just assuming that your rule is perfect, and since the messages are auto-purging in a week you won’t use up your account quota even if you get blasted by junk. If you still get junk after a few weeks and everything in that folder is of no use to you, then you can change the rule to permanently delete. You can even leave that folder active and change it so that all arriving messages from that sender are marked as spam, which might eventually prevent them from bothering others.

As pointed out by others, sending any type of auto-reply is counterproductive. The person bothering you could redirect those to someone else and it would look like you were spamming them! It’s always a bad idea to send any reply email automatically unless you are temporarily away (vacation message) or are moving to a new email address and want to notify your friends. Even in those cases you can get into trouble with automatically generated responses.

Bill
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Old 6 Sep 2019, 06:29 AM   #5
NJSS
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Many thanks for your comments.

One of the questions is whether to do this at the FM level or earlier at POBox?

It's only one person, with a couple of email addresses, and I'm currently doing as n5bb suggested.

NJSS
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Old 6 Sep 2019, 06:22 PM   #6
BritTim
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Quote:
Originally Posted by NJSS View Post
Many thanks for your comments.

One of the questions is whether to do this at the FM level or earlier at POBox?

It's only one person, with a couple of email addresses, and I'm currently doing as n5bb suggested.

NJSS
It would be aesthetically more pleasing to do it immediately at POBox, but from a practical point of view it probably does not matter. You may prefer to do it at FastMail because it is then easy to check messages you quarantine (by moving them to a special auto purge folder).
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Old 7 Sep 2019, 12:48 AM   #7
FredOnline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by n5bb View Post
As pointed out by others, sending any type of auto-reply is counterproductive
Good advice from Bill, some people positively thrive on responses, some people get annoyed when they get no responses at all - one only has to look at this forum for examples of both.
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Old 7 Sep 2019, 01:30 AM   #8
TenFour
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Personally, I would suggest blocking at the POBox level. If the messages stress you out you don't want to be filing them anywhere that you might be tempted to look at later. On the other hand, I have deliberately filed threatening messages just in case I might need the evidence later.
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Old 7 Sep 2019, 08:44 AM   #9
Berenburger
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Quote:
Originally Posted by NJSS View Post
I am being harassed by someone & I need guidance as how best to deal with this. The person in question has 2 or 3 email addresses & is emailing me at my POBox.Com address which forwards to FM.
Off topic.
I was wondering, why do you have an account with Pobox and an account with FM?
Both are the same company, have more or less the same feature set and both are providing the same mail client (/w mailstore plan @pobox).
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