Thursday June 12, 2008
Use Gmail to block your spam
I’ve been using Microsoft’s spam filter in Outlook 2007 for the past year, and it has been doing a fairly decent job. Recently, however, I’ve been receiving a lot of Japanese spam that Outlook has no idea how to filter. Since I didn’t want to block all Japanese email, I had to figure out a way to filter it out before it got to me. Here’s what I did.
Sign up for a Gmail account
Gmail does a great job of filtering spam so go and sign up for an account. It doesn’t really matter what email address you end up with. Let’s say you got spamfilter101@gmail.com
Get yourself an new email address from your ISP or Domain
You’ll need a brand new email address to work with. Either you can ask your Internet Service Provider for one, or you can make one for yourself if you have your own domain name to work from. Again, the name doesn’t matter that much. Let’s say you got myspamtrap@yourdomain.com
Forward all the mail from your main email to your Google email
You’ll need to forward all the email coming to main account to your new Gmail address. Again, you can do this with your ISP or through your Domain.
Have Google forward your email to your new email address
You can now get Google to forward all your email from your spamfilter101@gmail.com account to your new myspamtrap@yourdomain.com
Now you’ll get all the added protection of Gmail’s spam filters. In my case, my Japanese spam has almost completely disappeared…and my Russian spam…and my Abrabic spam…
