Your Mac as the Spam Filter
Due to limitations of the iOS platform, there is not currently an iPhone version of SpamSieve. However, you can use SpamSieve on your Mac to keep the spam off your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. The Mac has more bandwidth and processing power, so it makes sense to do the spam filtering there, anyway. When you check for mail on your iPhone, you won’t waste time, battery power, or cellular data downloading or processing spam messages.
Cleaning the iPhone’s Inbox
In most cases, you don’t have to do anything extra for SpamSieve to filter the spam on your iPhone. SpamSieve is already removing the spam from your Mac’s inbox, so the normal IMAP/Exchange synchronization will automatically remove the spam messages from the iPhone’s inbox as well. (If you are not already using IMAP or Exchange, please see the Converting Your Apple Mail Setup to IMAP section.) New messages will arrive in the inbox, and SpamSieve will move the spam messages to the Junk mailbox. When the iPhone checks for new mail, the spam messages will generally already have been moved out of the inbox.
When Filtering Occurs
In order for messages to be filtered, your mail program needs to be running on your Mac. The Mac either needs to be on or set up for Filtering Spam During Power Nap. If your Mac is not on and connected to the Internet all the time, you will want to at least make sure that it is running shortly before you check mail on your phone so that there’s time for the messages to be filtered.
You can set your Mac to automatically wake up at a certain time so that it can filter messages:
On macOS 13 and macOS 14, you can use the “pmset” command in Terminal. For example, you can enter the command:
sudo pmset repeat wake MTWRFSU 7:00:00
to wake the Mac at 7 AM every morning. More complicated schedules are also possible.
On earlier versions of macOS, you can configure a sleep/wake schedule using the Battery or Energy Saver pane of System Preferences.
Training SpamSieve to Correct Mistakes
SpamSieve puts the spam that it catches into the special Junk, which syncs between all your devices. Thus, you will always have access to the suspected spam messages, in case a good message is accidentally moved there.
Timing Issues
If the iPhone happens to see a new spam message before the Mac does:
Troubleshooting iPhone Spam Filtering
If there are spam messages in the inbox on your iPhone: