Saturday, May 19, 2012

A good spam and Gmail tip

My good old pal Paul gave me a good tip. I'd mass-mailed a notice that I had to close an old email address because of so much spam that much of it got past two potent filtering systems! He wrote:


GMail spam filtering is the best (except for one or two expensive corporate services). Any GMail account can be told to retrieve email for your old address - just go to Cogwheel, Settings, then click the Accounts and Import tab and about 2/3rds of the way down the page, you will find a place to add an existing POP mail account. Google then checks the mail for you, filters it for spam, and puts it in your inbox (though you can always use a filter rule to forward it to another email address if you really want to). I use this with some old 20 year old email addresses, that I was about to abandon because of spam. The only snag with this is that you don't get to choose the frequency that Google checks the email - it is generally about every half hour but more frequent if that account gets a lot of mail.
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2 comments:

ttl said...

GMail spam filtering is the best (except for one or two expensive corporate services).

Gmail occasionally generates false positives, i.e. filters out non-spam mail. Other than that, I'm sure its filters are reasonably good.

Mind you, I don't see what the big deal is. Spamdyke solved the spam problem for me many years ago. And I have tens of active email addresses, some originating from the early 1990s.

The problem with Gmail is giving Google, and consequently the CIA, FBI, DHS, etc. access to all your mail. This in my view is much worse than any amount of spam you could ever get.

Anonymous said...

G-mail is awful. It is very user unfriendly, relies on invites to use, generates it's own spam by filtering out your non-spam e-mails, gives to much information to the government. Keeps e-mails you tried to delete, the list goes on and on.

I also don't like the fact that you must have a g-mail account to download apps for the android based phones. I understand i-tunes, but with all of the inherent problems with g-mail and google as a whole you can keep it.