NaDrew's Journal: Beating spam the Gmail way

I'm beating spam in my personal inbox using Gmail's powerful filtering, without changing my email address.

Gmail now offers every member 50 invites. Millions of users and the power of a single spam database have made Gmail's spam filter one of the best. Gmail also offers POP3/SMTP access to the service. Combined, these provide a perfect method to utilize Gmail's powerful spam filtering on my primary email address--without the trouble and fuss of actually changing addresses. Here's how I did it.

1. Create a new Gmail account, using an invitation from one of my existing accounts.
2. In the "Forwarding and POP" tab of the "Settings" section, set the following:
   • Disable forwarding (default)
   • Enable POP for all mail
   • When messages are accessed with POP, archive Gmail's copy
3. Redirect your primary email account to your new Gmail account. Note that this usually requires administrative access to your mail server, or a friendly mail administrator.
4. Configure your email client. Note that I am using my existing SMTP settings, and am only using Gmail for POP3.

Now mail coming in to your primary account is automatically bounced to your Gmail account, where the Gmail spam filters are applied. Then your mail client downloads your mail from Gmail to your local inbox, just like normal. Since you didn't change your outbound settings, replies and new mail are not affected.

I set this up in March 2005 and so far Gmail has filtered almost every spam message I would have received. That's spam I didn't download!

You'll want to log in to the new Gmail account once a week or once a month to check the spam folder. This is just to check for false positives--"good" messages which may have been filtered as spam. It won't happen often but it's worth checking once in a while to make sure.