Killing Spam & IMAP Your Gmail

Killing Spam

My Griffin Webworks email has been riddled with spam for years. Long ago, I exposed my email to the web with my first incarnation of Griffin Webworks, and spam started rolling in after a few months. My web host for Griffin Webworks, Media Temple, has a spam filter called Mail-Protect, which is decent, but not as good as Gmail’s spam filter.

My personal Gmail account sees much less spam. It has mostly to do with the fact that I keep it private, and that Gmail has a great spam filter. So to get rid of my GW spam, I decided to route my GW account through a Gmail account to see what effect it would have on filtering out the spam. I went from about 20 spam emails a day to about 1 spam email a day.

It’s very simple what I did, and anybody with any technical expertise probably already has this set up, or has some other method of filtering their spam. I’ll run through the steps on how I did this:

1. Create a new “branded” (aka #######@griffinwebworks.com) email, and a new Gmail account just for spam filtering.
2. Set up my public-facing branded email to forward to the Gmail account I just created.
3. Set up Gmail to forward to the new branded email I created in step 1
4. In Mail.app (or your favorite email client), change your account to use your public-facing email as the reply-to email.

Now your branded email will run through Gmail’s wonderful spam filter and then forward to a private account.

IMAP your Gmail

UPDATE 10/23/07: looks like Google finally released IMAP for Gmail, which renders this tutorial meaningless.

One annoying thing about Gmail is their lack of support for IMAP. Using Gmail via POP isn’t so bad when you only have one computer (as I did). Now that I have an iPhone, I had duplicate emails coming into 2 email clients. Ironically, to solve this problem I had to do the opposite of what I did above to kill my spam:

1. Set up a new email with IMAP capabilities (in this case, a new Griffin Webworks email).
2. Forward my Gmail to the email I created in step 1
3. Set up the IMAP account in Mail.app (or your favorite email client) using your Gmail as the reply-to email. I did this by setting up Gmail as the outgoing server.

My Griffin Webworks email is virtually spam free, and my Gmail account has IMAP capabilities.

Also see: Spam Free Email (For The iPhone) by Sean Sperte