For some reason, the amount of spam I receive spiked precipitously about three weeks ago. Can’t explain it. After five years of having an email address on my own domain, with limited, if any, spam control, it’s something I’ve grown used to: watching the ebb and wane of spam saturation in my Inbox.
This last spike was particularly bad, however. So, three days ago, I turned … to Gmail. No, I didn’t switch to Gmail. Rather, I’m using Gmail to filter out the spam from my Eateggs email address.
The setup was fairly simple. Under the “Accounts” tab (in Settings, when logged in to my Gmail account), I added my eateggs account under “Get Mail from other accounts:”
Then I went to the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab,” and, under “POP Download,” enabled POP for all mail. I then set the option, “When messages are accessed with POP,” to “archive Gmail’s copy.”
I then followed Google’s straight-forward instructions to configure my copy of Outlook Express to work with Gmail’s server–which has the added advantage of working regardless of if I’m at home, with my Bresnan connection, or at school. I sent a couple test emails. I noticed about a three minute delay or so between when I sent the email and when it arrived in my Outlook Express Inbox–at little slower than normal but, strangely, the only thing that actually arrived in my Inbox was bona-fide mail.
Additionally, every email sent or received, proxied through Gmail, is archived in Gmail. Not only can I now access any email I’ve sent or received through my Eateggs account via Gmail from any computer at any time, but it’s also reassuring to know that Gmail is keeping a copy of my email (–in case my computer should catch fire, explode, or annoy me enough to get thrown out a window or smashed by my car. Gee… I rather with Gmail could keep a back up of my cell phone contacts and text messages!)
In the three days since setting up the Gmail proxy, I have received ZERO–count them: one, two … none!–pieces of spam in my Eateggs Inbox. I logged in to my Gmail account tonight, for the sake of curiosity, and there, in my Spam folder, were 291 fresh new spam messages. Quickly browsing through them, I realized that Gmail hadn’t missed a beat–every message was spam–spam like the spam that, a week ago, was slowly driving me crazy. Er. I clicked “select all”, and then “delete permanently.” And it was gone. All of it. Ejected into the abysmal refuse heap of dark and murky cyberspace. Forever. It’s not even in my “deleted items.” Which means I’ll never have to see it again.
TLDR Summary: 1) too much spam on personal domain email address. 2) routed personal email address through Gmail. 3) no more spam. 4) Thank you, Google!
