MJAX.COM

I think everybody who has been around the internet for some time will appreciate the frustration of wading through tons of spam before getting to your actual email messages. I use 6 email accounts which all have several aliases and for some domains I am the “catch-all”. My oldest email address stems from 1997 and as email address protection was not so much of an issue in those days, it’s probably on every spam list you can imagine. Over the last years my daily dose of spam has risen up to 600 messages a day, which brings the signal-to-noise-ratio for my email somewhere around 10%.

Of course there are several free and commercial spam filters available, some of which do work quite nice. I have used my share of them, all over the effectiveness spectrum, with the Outlook built-in filter somewhere at the bottom and my most recent experience with CloudMark Desktop among the best. But the problem with client side spam filtering is that your spam only gets filtered when it’s fetched by the spam filter client. This means that when you access your email through several means, like web mail, PDA, cellphone, Outlook, you should have spam filtering running on all those clients. For some of these access methods spam filtering isn’t even available and for those that are available, spam filtering has to be installed, configured and maintained, which can be a chore and a burden for your wallet in case of the commercial products available.

As spam will probably never go away and I personally do not like the challenge-response system used by some spam filters, where the sender of the email has to complete a challenge in order to sent email to you (spam filtering should be transparent to the sender of the email), the best solution for spam filtering is to do it at the server. This means that your email is filtered before it gets to the client, so no client configuration is needed, and all present and future email clients will benefit from this. But most of us don’t have our own server running on which to install such a filter. An even if you do, setting up and maintaining a spam filter on your server can be quite a hassle. Ideally, you would a want a fire-and-forget solution, that filters your email without ever requiring any configuration or maintenance.

Everyone who has worked with Gmail at one moment or the other, will recognize the power of Google’s spam filter. It has a very, very low false-positive ratio and it works just out of the box! Wouldn’t it be great to have Google’s spam filtering for your own non-Gmail account?

I set out to use Gmail’s excellent spam filtering for all my email accounts, with some requirements:

1. My current clients (Outlook on several computers, cellphone, web mail) should not require any changes in configuration.
2. Filtered spam should not be thrown away, but kept somewhere, so we can periodically check for false-positives.

In short, the following steps will bring you (almost) spam free email to any of your accounts:

1. Create a Gmail account.
2. Create a spam free alias for your current IMAP/POP3 account.
3. Configure Gmail to forward all email to your spam free alias.
4. Make your current email address forward to your Gmail account.

There are some requisites though:

1. You should be able to specify email aliases for your mailbox
2. You should be able to create a forwarding email alias

Most email systems and ISP’s allow you to do this through some kind of web Control Panel.
Let’s look at these steps in more detail.

We’ll assume the following email setup, before applying Gmail spam filtering to it:

Mail server:
mail.example.com

User name:
john

Password:
<secret>

Email addresses and aliases:
john.doe@example.com
info@example.com
sales@example.com

Step 1: Create a Gmail account

Ideally you would create a separate Gmail account for each email address you wish to protect from spam. We’re not going to use this Gmail account for anything other than spam filtering, so not even for web mail access (although you could use it for this purpose).

Go over to Gmail’s registration page, to create a new Gmail account. If you already have an Gmail account you would like to use for this, you can skip this step.

Step 2: Create a spam free alias for your current IMAP/POP3 account.

This step is tricky to explain, because there are so many different email systems out there and all require different steps to create email aliases. Most ISP’s have some sort of online Control Panel in which you can manage your email settings.

The goal is to create a new email alias and link this to the existing IMAP/POP3 account, i.e. all mail sent to john_spamfree@example.com should be delivered to your existing mailbox.

After creating this alias, test it by sending an email to it: it should arrive in your current mailbox.

Step 3: Configure Gmail to forward all email to your spam free alias.

Login to your (brand new) Gmail account and go to “Settings” in the upper right corner. Now click the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab. Set up “Forward a copy of incoming mail to” to your new spam free alias (in our case john_spamfree@example.com).

You can choose to leave the default “keep Gmail’s copy in the inbox” to effectively have a backup of all your email in your Gmail account. I prefer to set it to “delete Gmail’s copy”, so that the Gmail account will only contain the filtered spam.

Make sure you click the “Save Changes” button after setting things up.

Now test your forwarding setting by sending an email directly to your Gmail account.

Step 4: Make your current email address forward to your Gmail account

Again, this can be tricky, as some email systems will not allow you to setup a forwarding alias. If yours does, you’ll probably find its setup in the same Control Panel as in step 2.

The trick is to setup your actual email address to forward to your Gmail account. In our case we would like john.doe@example.com to forward to john.doe@gmail.com. Do the same for all email aliases you might have. So we have setup forwarding for our info@example.com and sales@example.com aliases to the same Gmail address.

Now test your final setup by sending an email to your original email address (john.doe@example.com) and all of its aliases. If you setup everything OK, it should arrive in your IMAP/POP3 mailbox.

Done!

You now can access your email from all devices and clients and enjoy spam free email everywhere. Don’t forget to login to your Gmail account regulary to check for false positives.

You can repeat these steps for every mailbox you wish to protect. Just remember to create a seperate Gmail account for each mailbox. This setup has brought down my spam count from 600 a day to 3 per week! I hope it is just as effective for you.

Tags: Email, Gmail, Google, IMAP, POP3, spam

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 6:42 am and is filed under Email. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.