I get way too much spam. To the tune of 2,000+ each day. It’s always fun to wake up and sift through 800 emails to find 3 that aren’t spam. I do some client-side spam filtering, but it’s still annoying to have to actually download the emails (especially when traveling and you have a slow Internet connection).
Gmail is by far the best web-based email system I’ve used (it’s fast, clean, etc.), but it’s not practical to use for business (since the domain is always gmail.com). Recently I noticed that Gmail allows you to access your email via POP3 (via SSL, which is really nice!). So I played around with it a little bit, and realized that stuff that gets stuck in the spam folder are not downloaded with you grab your emails via POP3. So then I was thinking, why not just forward my normal email to my gmail account, access it via POP3 like normal and then just have that account on my client setup with my real email address.
Guess what? It works brilliantly. Now I’m not flooded with spam, I don’t have to download spam for client-side filtering and when I send email, it still comes from digitalpoint.com.
The one thing that would make it even better (and make me use it from the web more) would be the ability to set the From address to my non-Gmail address. Currently you can set the Reply-To address to anything you want, but the From is always gmail.com. If that was possible, I would use Gmail’s SMTP server (it’s also SSL enabled) and I would use the web interface for Gmail more.
I hope that works.. You will just have to figure out what to do with all the free time you get..
You think too much…;)
Shawn, Nathan from InsideGoogle. I posted about your idea, and was wondering if you could put up some numbers showing how well Gmail filtered your spam. Thanks.
It works pretty well. So far zero false positives, and less than 1% of the spam getting through.
How do you do to delete/not store spam messages at your GMail account? If you receive 2000+ spam messages daily, to delete them manually will be very hard.
Unfortunately, when you forward your GMail messages to another account, spam messages are forwarded too 🙁
It’s fine because stuff in the Spam folder is not downloaded via POP3 in Gmail. And it doesn’t matter if spam would get forwarded from Gmail, because I’m not forwarding my Gmail. 🙂
GMail also has a forwarding service now. So, I give out my gmail address and forward those emails that pass a filter to my regular address. Works, too.
This is nice… Now that I have a GMail account I will use it as a spam filter and a gathering point to all my email (I will see if this is possible).
I would really love to have the hability to send the email thru my own email address instead of the @gmail.com too…
that is a great idea….I am only using gmail as storage….but I must say that their SPAM filtering is very effective.
I get sooooo much spam from gmail addresses. I hope gmail starts getting serious about banning spammers. I will start block all from gmail accounts.
Hey Shawn, Sprint and other guys who wants to be able to reply not from @gmail.com: it IS possible in gmail!
Here is what you need to do:
1. Go to Settings -> Accounts
and add your desired email address, for example your digitalpoint.com email address.
2. On this same page you can set a default “reply from”. This option is in the bottom of the page:
“When I receive a message sent to one of my addresses:
Reply from the same address the message was sent to.”
3. And you can also always choose any of all of your added accounts to gmail when you are going to send email. Here is how to do this:
1) you’ve got a new email
2) you open it and press “Reply”
3) now just right in the top of your email, above the Title you’ve got
i would really love to have Now that I have a GMail account I will use it as a spam filter and a gathering point to all my email