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Gmail as a spam filter
Dylan’s plan to can spam by filtering it with Gmail made the rounds about a month ago, and it’s quite sharp.
After reviewing my own mailboxes, I discovered that 90% of my spam (~150 messages per day) was coming from the address listed here on johnzeratsky.com. I thought that by running this mail through a Gmail account and letting it do the heaving lifting, Mail.app would be a lot happier and I could stop using SpamSeive altogether (although it did do a great job). What’s more, Gmail’s interface is good enough that I don’t mind logging in every few days to guide its built-in spam filter and check for false positives (legitimate email erroneously marked as spam).
Anyway, back to Dylan. He suggests not only forwarding your main email to Gmail, but forwarding your Gmail back to your main email account (sans spam, of course). That way, you can continue to check your mail email as usual. To prevent an infinite loop of email forwarding, Dylan suggests creating a filter on your email server that doesn’t forward anything that came from Gmail.
This was all very confusing to me. It took 10 minutes just to get my head around the concept, then another hour to realize that Cpanel won’t let me create the mail filter I need, and I don’t have the server know-how to do it myself.
Fortunately, I devised a simpler solution:
- Create a new Gmail account with a silly, random or improbable username. (This is key.)
- Forward all email from your main account (“jazer AT this domain” in my case) to your new Gmail address.
- In your email client, create a new account or modify the existing one for your main email address — change the POP settings to download mail from your new Gmail account instead.
- Continue to send mail “from” your main email address, and continue to have people email you at that address. Gmail will catch most (if not all) of your spam, and your new filtering mechanism will remain totally invisible to you and the people you email with.
The primary difference between my approach and Dylan’s is that while he assumes you will continue to use both addresses (hence the double-redirect), I advocate leaving a “private” Gmail account in the background to do nothing but filter spam.
Any thoughts on why one method might be better than the other? What important step am I missing that Dylan’s approach covers nicely? Has anyone else tried using Gmail in this way?