James Webster’s Weblog

I recently had a query asking how to minimise spam. I was halfway through replying about how mail clients like Thunderbird handle spam when I realised that I get very little spam. My work account at Amazon gets lots of spam but they have a heavyweight server to detect it and my mail rules do the rest. However at home I don’t get much spam. The answer, I believe, is Google. Just as in Sunday-school the answer to everything is ‘Jesus’ and in Maths, beyond a certain level, the answer is always zero so the answer to most of today’s computing problems is Google (whether this is a good or a bad thing is open to debate). In this specific case the answer is Google Mail.

I’ve had a Google email account since the very early days. I sent a copy of all my email to Google simply so I’d got an independent secure copy. I rarely delete email, you just never know when it will be useful. Relatively recently Google added new functionality, allowing you to connect to your gmail account as if it were a POP3 server. (I once implemented a POP3 server and client using Java and Delphi - this was back in the 20th century). Google has it’s own clever spam detection rules and it has been quietly filtering my mail. If I log-on to the gmail web client I can see that actually I have lots of spam.

To have a spamless life you’ll need an email account that will allow you to bulk forward your emails to another account. Most accounts should let you do this although you may have to go hunting to find the option. You then need a Google Mail account - which is free. The biggest criticism of Google mail is that their systems read your email so that they can choose good adverts for you. Personally my email really isn’t that interesting and if it was I’d just encrypt it.

Once you have an active account click on the settings link (top right) then under the Accounts heading you need to tell Google to send email using your current email address. Once created you need to make this the default address. If that all worked you should now be able to send email from Google as if it were your own account.

Now select ‘forwarding and POP’ and choose one of the enable POP options. Which option will depend on how much email you already have in your Google account. You can play with the other options but that should be the Google account setup complete.

The complexity of configuring your email client varies from client to client but there are pretty good docs.

What should be happening now is that email sent to your account will be forwarded to Google. Google kindly filter out the spam and then you collect your email from Google. Although you now have a second email address your contacts shouldn’t notice because it is hidden behind your old account. A second advantage of this setup is that you can send and receive email anywhere through the Google mail web pages (Many accounts offer this anyway so it might not be helpful).

It is well worth testing this by sending email to yourself and getting a friend to email you. Before writing this I asked around to see how other people were solving this. Reassuringly Simon outlined an identical setup.