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.

Gmail And Spam

Here's a bit more to add to my post, A True Spam Solution.

It's been 20 days since I have been picking up the email of my problem account through Gmail that was attracting 20-30 spam per day.

The Gmail filter and has let an average of 1 spam per day through so it is not perfect but as good as it gets; I can certainly live with that.

So now I have opened a new Gmail account for the soul purpose of handling this problem account.

I also use the extension Gmail Manager to monitor from Firefox what is going on with my various accounts, i.e. how many spam mails are arriving to each account. So far Gmail has not marked 1 email as spam incorrectly.

Here's a screen shot of the pop-up from the status bar (but not my status bar).

A True Spam Solution

Zero Spam Day has finally arrived!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

For those of you who have a Gmail account then spam probably does not worry you because the excellent anti-spam and anti-virus filters incorporated compulsorily by default into Gmail silently does its job.

For those of you who have email accounts with other ISP's, service providers, etc. which is the majority of us then my bet is that you've got problems. I am and always have been vigilant about being conscious of anonymity on the Internet and hence have been careful as to who gets what email address during a software trial or news service or whatever.

BUT one of my accounts has suffered severely; like 20-30 spams per day. How this address was released to spammers I have no idea but it is. I have tried all sorts of filters and services to eliminate spam from this account and to no avail. The best system I have tried eliminated just short of 50% but that may as well be nothing!!!

Welcome external Gmail accounts!!!

It is a Beta Beta if that makes any sense so if you are lucky then it is available to you now. I have 4 Gmail accounts and it is available on only one.

Go to Gmail -> Settings -> Accounts and add the details of your external account.

It sure does clean up my inbox.

No More Spam!!

Gmail is still an invite only service so if you don't have an account and want one then send me a mail to albyxx at gmail dot com.