What is an app specific password?

In this post we would like to provide you with the high level explanation of the use of app specific password for email addresses. We all know that in order to log in to an email client or a web version of email interface we all need an email address and its password. That is common and pretty simple. When it comes to app specific password there is a little chance you might get confused a bit. Let’s dig deeper to better understanding and making use of there passwords.


Nowadays such email providers as Google, Apple, Yahoo and others commonly use the app specific password for their email accounts. These passwords allow you to sign in to your account securely using different apps. It is a long randomly generated password that should be entered only once when setting up a third-party app. A perfect example of this scenario is Spamdrain.


Let’s imagine that you have an email account from one of the mentioned above email providers. Usually you cannot add your email address to the filtering without using an app specific password. We care about security of our customers’ email addresses and that is why we recommend using an app specific password. You only need to create an app specific password once when you sign up or add an email address to the filtering. Once you enter that password Spamdrain will be able to log in to your email server and start filtering your email address messages, this is the beginning of your tidy and clean Inbox.


Sounds easy, right? However, the next question that could come to your mind is where can you get that password? Usually when you log in to your Apple, Gmail, Outlook or other provider you will have an option to generate the password for specific app at security section. We have guides for almost all providers in our helpdesk and even if you cannot find the guide don’t hesitate to contact our support in order to get any help.

For example using Apple based account you can easily generate an app specific password here:

Once you click on Generate Password button you will be able to create it for specific app.

Another good example is google app specific password: https://support.spamdrain.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002633617-Adding-gmail-address-to-the-filtering-

The link above provide you with a very detailed step by step video guide.

Using this guide you will be able to easily create an app specific password for Yahoo email addresses.


Hope, this information was useful for you and now you will be able to set up any app specific password if needed.


Thanks for reading.
Spamdrain team.

Spamdrain Plus: domain filtering feature and other advantages

Have you been with Spamdrain for a while or are you a new customer? Are you searching for an ideal spam filter or just looking for a way to get rid of all spam in your Inbox? In all cases you might be interested in reading further this article as we are going to highlight all advantages you get when choosing Spamdrain + for filtering your emails.

As you may already know Spamdrain has two different types of subscription: Spamdrain basic and Spamdrain plus. When and why to choose the second option? Here are 5 reasons to help you make the right choice.

  1. No limits for added email addresses.
    One of the biggest advantages of Spamdrain+ is that you could have unlimited number of added to the filtering email addresses. The bigger amount of email addresses you have the bigger discount you get!, which is a perfect choice for those who need to filter more than 5 email addresses.
  2. Multiple users.
    Using Spamdrain+ you make use of multiple users option. This feature allows you to create separate users with separate logins for each of them. Basically, you can have little set of subscriptions under your owner one. Plus, the owner account is the billing contact account that gives other users a possibility not to think about billing and just use an awesome spam filter and enjoy a clean Inbox. We would recommend this option for big companies having multiple departments/divisions.
  3. Domain filtering.
    What you could also love Spamdrain plus for is domain filtering feature. With domain filtering your email gets filtered before it reaches your email server. You accomplish this by changing your current MX records in your DNS to SpamDrain’s servers instead of your current ones. In order for this to work you first have to add your domain to your SpamDrain account along with your current email server and then specify which addresses we should filter. We suggest using this feature for those ones who are familiar with changing MX records for their domain.
  4. Add aliases to the filtering
    Using domain filtering you can also add an unlimited number of aliases to the added email address. The best thing about it is that the aliases are free of charge🙂
  5. Support service.
    On the top of all the features above there is one that we find the most helpful – email support. Using Spamdrain plus you will get unlimited support related to any possible questions regarding Spamdrain. Any issue you may face, any feedback that comes to your mind or just a “hello” – our support team will be available for you and you will definitely get a reply.

    You can also check more info here:

    https://spamdrain.com/en/index.html#/pricing

    or just leave a comment if you would like us to clarify something and we will get back to you right away.

    Thanks for reading and stay safe!

3 simple steps to start using Spamdrain

Have you ever thought that your Inbox is full of messages you do not read and simply do not need? Have you ever spent a lot of time manually sending spam to Spam folder and wishing to never receive similar ones? Have you ever dreamt of an application that would remove junk emails before they reach your email address?If you answered Yes to at least one of the questions above this article is a “must read” for you.


Here are 3 simple steps to start using Spamdrain – an application that stops junk emails, frees Inboxes from spam, learns your preferences and makes life just a bit easier.


1. Sign up

In order to sign up for the service you may follow the link from your desktop https://spamdrain.com/en/signup.html or use a mobile app (either an iOS app or an Android one). Our sign up is an easy one and you should get onboard in a few clicks with no problems. Still if you have some questions – don’t worry here our support comes to the rescue: support@spamdrain.com. Now when you have already received a welcome message and your email address filtering is already started it would be useful to get acquainted with the service a little bit more.


2. What Spamdrain is about

Basically, what Spamdrain does is filtering spam and unwanted messages before they reach your Inbox. It also gives you a report of email messages that were blocked. Talking about blocked, those messages stay in the blocked list (spam, unwanted newsletters, phishing mails, annoying messages you don’t want to see).

The good ones stay in the allowed list (trusted messages, valid mails, wanted news etc.).

All this work is performed by your personal helper which we call Spamster 🙂

3. The filter learns from your preferences.

This means that if there is an incorrectly blocked message you can simply release it (by clicking on the message icon) and Spamdrain will try not to block similar message again.

The same about incorrectly allowed messages. If you find a message in the allowed list that should be blocked please try to report it (by clicking on the message icon) and Spamdrain will learn from your preferences.

You might think, why to teach a spam filter how to do the work. The reason is that your Spamster does not know you yet, therefore what the other customers might find a useful message could be a garbage message for you. That is why it takes some time to get more familiar with the service and give the service a chance to get to know you better. Believe us, once you pass that period you will be more than happy. By the way, this is what the 14 days free trial is meant to be!

In conclusion, one question is left to be answered: to use or not to use? Well, there should be no doubts here, definitely – to use. Spamdrain is like a guard that protects you from unwanted tons of spam and garbage messages so get acquainted with your guard today and stay safe 🙂

#Spamdrain #spamfilter #removejunkemails #stopspam #spamservice

Why do I need a spam filter?

If you are reading this article there is a high chance that you use an email either for business or personal needs. Here we’ve tried to gather some obvious and not so obvious reasons why you need an additional spam filter to your email address.


1. Personal vs Business email dealing with spam

You might think that your Gmail, Hotmail or Office 365 suite already has a built-in spam filter so why to get another one. Yes, most of the email providers do have an anti-spam solution built into the system. The real question is, though, how reliable they are? Usually out-of-the-box spam filters are designed with minimal filter requirements and your expectations from their work may be too high. Furthermore, when running a business it is even more important to secure your corporate email address based on the company domain from spam, graymail and malware. According to Radicati Research Group Inc., email spam costs businesses about $20.5 billion each year and the tendency is growing.

2. Graymail

Newsletters, intended or random subscriptions, advertisements – all of these are tons of emails loading email servers daily. For some of them email users are really waiting for, and most are just deleted without reading. One of the valuable “skills” of a spam filter is the ability to distinguish such “graymail” and remove it from your inbox. Graymail is a message that you previously opted to receive, but now there is no need to see it in the inbox. Such emails are not considered spam, as they aren’t used to get some unauthorized access to your data. What will be considered graymail in the particular Inbox depends on user actions over time and a spam filter will learn to block the unwanted messages. It is definitely easier than to unsubscribe manually from all


3. Malware

According to 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report (Verizon) 94% of malware is delivered to end users via email messages. Every ninth malware which got through to the victim was delivered via email. Typical files with infections soft are MS Office documents and Widnows Apps. Using a Spam filter will eliminate the risk of becoming the next malware victim for sure.

4. Ability to learn

You can train a spam filter to sort out the messages right. The filter learns from your preferences. If you mark a message as spam, similar email will be blocked next time. It works vice versa as well – when a valid message gets to the blocked list it can be released and some email like that will get through to your Inbox in the future. You can also whitelist or blacklist particular domains depending on your preferences and analyzing which emails should always be received and which should be filtered out.

5. Best choice for a busy individual

Let us draw you a small picture. Your daily schedule (to-do list) is filled to the top with high priority tasks. You have a small break for lunch during which you still check your emails from your smartphone. You open your inbox and see that its overwhelmed with spam, marketing and newsletters and sorting all these messages you have no time to look through real valid emails and even finish your lunch. The picture looks realistic for lots of people nowadays, do you agree? The second scenario will look a bit brighter. You are still busy with lots of daily activities, but you have a Spam Filter app for your email. You open your Inbox during lunch, all spam was blocked by a Spam filter and you see couple of expected messages from clients, friends or your boss. You quickly look though the content, drop some replies and finish your meal. One more check mark ✔ in the to-do list appears and with a smiley face you are beck to the rest of activities.

To sum up all mentioned above, we’d like to add that anti-spam application is a solution that pays up in money, time and even less stressful life. If you are still in doubt, just try one.Click here to sign up for Spamdrain spam filter & use 14 days free trial period. We are sure that you will feel the difference and make good friends with your Spamster 🙂

Spam messages pollution

We all know that environment protection is one of the highest priority (if not the highest) nowadays in all countries. People are struggling with fossil fuel emissions from plants, pollution from vehicles, untreated sewage etc. We will not continue this list since we think everyone is aware of the root causes. What we would like to highlight though is the pollution from spam messages.


According to recent findings more than 64 million of unnecessary email messages are being sent in Britain every day. Each spam message has a footprint equivalent to 0,3 grams of CO2 emissions. Even though that may sound a little overestimated at first, every year the global carbon footprint of spam equals the carbon footprint of burning 2 billion gallons of gasoline. This number is probably more serious comparing to 0,3 grams. That could result in you daily commutes, road-trips, visits to the park.


Another good thing to think about was mentioned in the book of carbon footprint expert Mike Berners-Lee “How Bad are Bananas: The Carbon Footprint of Everything”. The author says that a typical year of incoming mail adds 136kg of emissions to a person’s carbon footprint, or the equivalent of “driving 200 miles in an average car”.


Another interesting discovery describes the following:
The carbon footprint of spam:
0.3g CO2: A spam email
4g CO2e: A proper email
50g CO2e: An email with long and tiresome attachment.


Given all these numbers you can see how badly spam message results in environment protection. We all use the email messages as a common way of communication nowadays and we all understand that is an essential part of our lives. However let’s strive to minimize the effect of spam messages. The less messages you open the less messages spammers will send seeing that they do not bring any result. The more messages stay in the blocked list of your Spamdrain account the cleaner environment we have.

Keep in mind that once all the spam messages are in the blocked list they could be removed in one click!


Don’t know what’s a Spamdrain blocked list? Sign up for free and and get to know your personal spamster!

Business email address: tips to start with

These days social distancing has already become not an exception but more like a general rule to follow. Zoom meetings and Skype calls have quickly substituted face-to-face communication and become a common thing all over the world. Email communication is popular as usual, but under all these circumstances its value can’t be underestimated. All these changes drastically affected personal life and business world.


At Spamdrain we believe that emails remain the heart of your business communication. Since so many people are forced to work, go shopping, travel, even consult with doctors online when it’s possible, we are convinced that focusing on email messaging should be a high priority for all business individuals.

In this article we would like to highlight the core principles one should focus on while evolving your email communication.


The very first one is going professional. Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo accounts are reliable, popular and trustful, of course. Still there is a but, they are not as distinctive as custom company name after @ in the email address. We suggest using common email domains (e.g. @gmail.com) for personal purposes, not the business ones. Nowadays having a registered email address at your own domain will cost you not more than a happy meal once a month, but will add up to a better company look and help to build trust with customers.

Second, choice of email provider that will suit your needs and expectations is as important as company domain itself. Most important factors that might affect your choice are security, safety and collaboration tools. Don’t forget to check bonuses like free trial period and discounts.

Third, cyber security – when using a corporate email address, think of tons of spam that can make mischief for your business. Here Spamdrain will come in handy. Adding an email address to spam filtering at Spamdrain will definitely increase safety, security and make your Inbox clean and tidy.

If you are already done with the first 2 steps and would like to get any help with our spamfilter setup, just contact Spamdrain support team, we’ll gladly assist you.


Found this post useful? Your likes and shares are highly appreciated 🙂

Working from home: maximize efficiency and minimize stress

During this challenging period we’ve gathered a few tips we think you might find helpful.

Find a working place

Working from home in most cases means you will need to stay exactly at home, not going to the park, not going to a café or elsewhere. Yep, due to the recent news working from home is not a luxury nowadays but a strong recommendation. By working place we mean a quiet place where disturbance can be minimized and efficiency maximized. We suggest trying a few things to check before you settle down, could be a kitchen or even a balcony, you never know until you try it yourself. Just keep in mind that whatever working place you choose it should be separate from your living space.

Create a working atmosphere

Ok, so you found a place in your flat or house that fits your needs. There are few more things we would suggest to create a nice working atmosphere. Someone might put on a shirt (maybe even with a tie?), somebody turns on some nice background music (why not, you are at home, listen whatever you like just don’t turn it on too loud), somebody attends all the meetings with a camera on. What we suggest is to use a good spam filter🙂 You never know when a spam message hits you. It can be during an important meeting or an interview, when nobody wants to get distracted. Spamdrain takes care of all these interruptions during work. Just sign up for Spamdrain (if you haven’t done it yet) and enjoy your working atmosphere without distraction from junk and spam emails.

Don’t forget to take a rest.

A major rule to complete your working from home day. Taking a rest every, let’s say, 30 minutes will keep you fit and help your eyes take a break regularly. You might easily find online some home exercises to do while working from home🙂

Enjoy your stay at home and spend this time efficiently.

Yours,

Spamdrain team.

Beware of phishing!

Phishing nowadays becomes more and more common. The number of people using credit cards is growing rapidly. Each individual might have more than one credit card and the bigger number of credit cards you own the bigger chances are to be a victim of those who scam people. However, stealing credit card details is not the only way how to scam users. Your credentials are another way of phishing that could be quite painful and harmful once happen. We all understand that credit card phishing usually results in funds. Credentials phishing, on the other hand, results in data loss in most cases or unwanted personal information spreading.


We have already warned our users on the things mentioned above and now we’d like to share more tips and tricks on how to avoid these unwelcome surprises:

  • never enter your credit card details on suspicious websites and think twice before making an online purchase on the site you have never shopped with before. Furthermore, we suggest having a separate credit card (with limited funds there) for online purchases only (yes, this would increase your credit cards number but this would definitely secure your main credit card).
  • never reply to email messages asking you to provide credit card details, bank details, personal information. It does not hurt to contact your bank provider’s support to double check.
  • websites with secure connection (https instead of http in the url), ssl connection of your email address settings instead of tls, correct website names (e.g. amazon instead of arnazon) are worth paying attention when it comes to online activity.
  • your email address credentials should be secured too. What can you do here? First of all strong password: “crQ3&9fk22dcrec(M” is much better than “passworD!”, even though it could be hard for you to remember. A good habit is to change your password regularly (“regularly” here means like once in three months, not once a year🙂 )
  • in terms of email address we also highly recommend using two factor authentication which adds another layer to security of your messages. App specific passwords are your best friends and do not hesitate to make them work for you.

All these precautions are really helpful, but malicious individuals or group of individuals will still be trying to scam you and your email address. Here come our spamsters: they will guard your Inbox and keep it clean an tidy. We will do our best to keep these messages away and leave only legitimate mails for you.
Besides, you can always contact Spamdrain support if you think there is a suspicious message even if you are in a very little doubt about that.
Do you try following all of the tips above? Probably, you can add something useful on how to stay safe and sound in this world of phishing and spam? Your thoughts and ideas are very welcome in comments.
If you like the post, feel free to share it with your friends 🙂

Thanks for reading!

2019 filtering stats

There are a few days left in 2019 and it is time to sum up our spamsters hard work during this year.

This year our spamsters worked even harder than the last one. If we look at the last year numbers we can see, that there were 348M messages filtered (almost 1 million messages per day) and this year we already have 405M messages filtered. Yes, keep in mind that we still have a few days left in this year and considering all the holidays spam messages we might get more messages filtered. By doing simple math you can see that our spamsters usually filter close to 13 messages per second. For instance, from the time you start reading this blog post there are already up to 1000 messages filtered.

As you already know, the messages at the statistics menu at your account are divided into valid, spam, virus, newsletters blocked and newsletters not blocked columns. Here are the numbers of filtered messages per column:

  • Valid: 135 M
  • Spam: 86 M
  • Virus: 0,2 M
  • Newsletters blocked: 58 M
  • Newsletters not blocked: 126 M

Here is a better visualization of the numbers:

Please feel free to check the statistics of your personal account here. We hope you might find interesting to see the stats of your own Spamster hard work.

We hope next year we will filter even more messages (and less spam messages of course 😉 )

Thanks for reading!

Black Friday spam messages

An increasing number of spam messages is currently being observed due to the upcoming Black Friday discounts. Some of them are really good ones but most of them are fake messages or just annoying spam you wouldn’t like to see in your Inbox.

As many researches around the web show, recipients tend to click on 50% of links in scam messages. That’s quite enough for a spammer to install the needed spyware on your device.

Nowadays shoppers are warned about the risks of such emails and harmful links. However you never know when and where you are going to face such messages, even a message that looks like from amazon.com can really be from arnazon.com (aRnazon) for example.

Here is where our Spamsters become your life servers, or just Inbox cleaners. Simply download either iOS app from App Store or Android app from Play Market (yep, we have both of them, just use “Spamdrain” keyword in the search) to your mobile device, sign up in seconds and that’s it. Your email address is already being filtered and you can see the result right away.

Please feel free to use the web version as well: https://spamdrain.com

In case you’d like to receive your favorite shop newsletters – you have an option to use the whitelist functionality to add the needed email addresses or domains for the wanted list and receive that messages all the time.

Using Spamdrain you will be armed good enough to eliminate the quantity of fake discounts and spam messages in your Inbox. Once you try it during the Black Friday you will never want to stop using it. Besides the app and web version we also provide support for our service, free of charge.

Thanks for reading!

Stay tuned and have a good shopping!