Monday, January 22, 2007

More To Gmail And The Fight Against Spam

I posted recently here and here about Gmail and its Mail Fetcher as it is officially called and the excellent built-in Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus protection of Gmail itself.

I wrote about checking your other external email accounts through Gmail and therefore gaining the use of the two "Anti's" mentioned above.

I must be stupid. I realized today that if you don't have access to the "Gmail Beta" "Mail Fetcher Beta" then most of you have the ability to forward your other email to a Gmail account.

For example, my wife has a Yahoo account that, through no fault of her own, attracts between 2-10 Spams per day. Yahoo do a pretty poor job of Spam filtering. Her 2 Gmail accounts do not have the Mail Fetcher possibility yet. So what to do? Forward all Yahoo mail to Gmail. So simple, why didn't I think of it before?

All mail still appears in your inbox exactly how it was sent and you still have, in Thunderbird anyway, the ability to reply to that email through your original outgoing (SMTP) server.

Gmail is functioning as a very successful pass-through filter.

Done!!!

Update:

It has been one month or 31 days since I have been picking this problem account up through Gmail Fetcher. Gmail has filtered out 775 messages as Spam at a 100% success rate of true spam, not one false positive, although it did let 26 slip through. That's less than 1 per day.

I can live with that.

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