Use Google GMail to Filter Spam

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Use Google GMail to remove spam from your e-mail
	If you frequent the web and especially newsgroup forums and use your real e-mail address in a web page or forum, it will only be a matter of time before you start to receive loads of e-mail inviting you to enlarge your penis, surgically enhance your breasts; buy drugs that you didn't know you needed - not to mention the improper invitations from a variety of disreputables; and the fact that your PayPal and eBay accounts, and the bank accounts you may or may not own, will always require updating. Assorted Nigerians will ask you to help them launder money and you will receive cards from friends you didn't know you had. Spam is the bane of the internet and spammers should be hung by delicate parts of their anatomy from the nearest street lamp! But all is not lost, and it needn't cost any more money, thanks to fellow MVP Juan T. Llibre who came up with the suggestion. You can currently get a Google GMail e-mail account free of charge. This provides POP and WEB mail free of charge and has the advantages that it is independent of your service provider and more relevant to this page, has excellent spam filtering. While you can use it as a conventional e-mail account, you may also use it to 'wash' the e-mail, from your existing e-mail accounts, free of spam. You can ether redirect your e-mail to your gmail account, or better still GMail will collect the mail from your other POP accounts!

Mail Reader Software
	Setup your mail reading software to receive from GMail but to send from your existing account - in the example below my MVPS.ORG account. I have shown illustrations from both Outlook (2007, though the dialogs for earlier versions are similar) and Outlook Express.
Outlook

Outlook Express

	When you send mail from your new GMail account despite what it may say in your Outlook Express 'send to' window (see below) the mail as seen by the recipient will appear to have come from your re-directed e-mail address and that will be the reply address thus repeating the cycle of redirection and spam washing.

	So pernicious is spam (the illustration below shows how many accumulate in the time it took to prepare this page so far) that there will inevitably false positive readings and any spam filter will discard required mail. To counteract this, GMail stores all spam for thirty days so you can occasionally dig in there and mark any item that is genuine as 'not spam'. The longer you use the system the fewer false readings you will receive.

	To reduce the numbers of false readings, it helps to prepare a 'white list' of recipients, messages from whom you do not wish to consign to the spam folder. You may have an address book in Outlook or Outlook Express or even some third party spam software. That address list can be exported and edited in Word to produce a comma delimited text file in the following format: "Name", "Email Address" "", "username@isp.com etc Such a file can easily be imported into GMail's contacts list. You don't even need anything in the name column as the import tool will derive a name from the e-mail address.