Fast mobile internet is one of the great things about living in Japan. Decades before the mobile internet took over the world, Japan was a technology leader with camera phones, streaming video, mobile email and more.
Unfortunately the jump to smart phones has caught many Japanese companies off guard and now the latest high tech phones are coming from American and Korean companies.
One legacy of the early Japanese mobile internet boom is the use of email rather than SMS for communicating between mobile users. Previous 2G phones in Japan were not able to send SMS messages to someone on a different network and as a result every mobile phone came with a carrier specific email address such as, docomo.ne.jp, ezweb.ne.jp, i.softbank.jp.
If you are a smart phone user then chances are you’ll never need to use the carrier email but annoyingly you will still receive a full screen email alert message every time you receive an email.
This can be incredibly annoying when your carrier email address gets picked up by a spam bot and suddenly you get flooded with emails. Fortunately there is an easy way to turn off the alert and protect yourself from unwanted spam.
1. Log into your SoftBank account by visiting My SoftBank on your phone. You will then be prompted to enter your phone number and password.
2. Once logged in scroll down the page and tap the email icon to access your email settings.
3. Scroll down until you see the Eメール(i) options and tap the blue button that says 次へ (next).
4. Here you are presented with your email options. To make it harder for spammers to add you change your email address to something complex. A simple email like john@i.softbank.jp is much easier for spammers to guess than john_i29384@i.softbank.jp.
4. To turn off the email alert tap the “Newly arriving e-mail notification setting” and change it to “Not Send”
Done! No more annoying email alerts from SoftBank.
Thanks to Reddit user mkthree for the tip.
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Ah, brilliant! It was still giving me alerts even though I’d removed the email account!
Great tip! Thanks!