February 05, 2006
Spam filter using Gmail
Recently I started automatically forwarding my email from my original email server on labf.org to my google account so that when I am not at home I can read my email on Gmail as it has a wonderful web interface. This way when I am not at home my email client will not download emails (because the computer is not on) and therefore all my emails are left in my Gmail account for online viewing. If I am at home then I use the POP download feature of Gmail to get my mail and automatically remove it from the Gmail server. Now I receive a very large amount of spam, like most of us with a web presence. Both my labf.org and Gmail server have spam filters and I also use the Apple Mail junk filter. Since redirecting my email through Gmail I have noticed that the spam filter on labf.org that only marks emails as potential spam are then filtered by Gmail so that when I actually download my email to my email client I only receive the very occasional spam message which is easily handled by Apple Mail. The upshot is that I now do not have to download large amounts of spam just to get a few messages.
Therefore, if you want to reduce the amount of spam you are downloading I would recommend to either use Gmail directly and use the POP access feature to download you email to your computer or forward you existing email account to your Gmail account and then download it through POP. By doing this you will drastically reduce the amount of spam that actually needs to be downloaded. A word of warning though, this does mean that you need to check both the Apple Mail junk filter folder and also the Gmail spam folder to make sure that no legitimate emails are deleted.
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