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Let google take care of your spam filtering!

Posted By Scott Klarr on Dec 27, 2007 at 7:11 pm

Making Email More Efficient

I own quite a few domains, and every one has at least one email attached to it. Ive had as many as 15 accounts hooked to my email client before (which at the time was Outlook), and it always had some serious lag checking all of them greatly due to the fact that 99% of crap mail made it through outlook's junk filter - making my inbox bulge with mails about cheap pills, webcam sites, and some other amusing but annoying ads.

For the last month or so I've been using thunderbird for my email on Linux and the spam filter works ok, but there is still plenty of junk that I have to delete myself daily - were talking 100+ a day - after the filtering!.

Pipe Email Through Gmail!

I heard that Gmail's spam filtering is top notch and so then I got thinking... why not pipe all my email accounts through Gmail to filter out spam at no cost? I decided to give it a try. What I did was setup a forwarder on all my email accounts (via CPanel) so they are pointing to my Gmail email address. Then I configured my Gmail account to archive all incoming email, and send a copy of each to an email account on my server.

While I was at it making this switch towards more efficiency, I also decided to switch my method of accessing the email acount from POP3, which I have used for years, to IMAP.

So by making these few changes, I have created several advantages:

1. Bye Bye Spam - Spam should not be much of an issue now which will save a lot of time usually spent skimming messages.

2. Portability - My email access is now more portable being able to access all my email from a single account via IMAP, which means I can access it simultaneously from multiple locations and devices without any cross syncing.

3. Lighter Weight - Having my email client check for new email every 5 minutes no longer requires as much of my system resources as before because there is only the 1 account to check, and the client does not need to do any sort of spam filtering in the new messages! Not to mention the number of emails that will actually be seen by the email client is now dramatically less because the spam is being filtered before it even reaches my inbox.

4. Archiving - One last benefit is that I will now have an archived copy of all my emails saved in Gmail - Data redundancy is always a good thing!

The Catch

I will need to login to Gmail through the web browser periodically to check the spam folder to make sure there aren't any good emails getting eaten. Other than that, there really should not be any issues with doing this!

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