Olho de Peixe Lda

SPAM has became a serious threat to office productivity. In our case, we loss everyday about half an hour just manually deleting those unwanted messages delivered by the thousands to our e-mail addresses.

There seems to be no barriers to SPAMMERS these days, fortunately, Google came to help with the free Gmail service, let me explain.

Google Mail developed one today’s more efficient Anti-Spam filters thanks to the collaborative effort of it’s users and the excellency of his engineers that gives us a chance to fight back the SPAMMERS.

Although Gmail is designed to be used with a Browser like Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer, it also works for those of us used to an e-mail client like Mozilla Thundebird.

In example, suppose that I want to use an e-mail address like (myname@mydomain.com) instead of (myname@gmail.com), I will use my mail server at mail.mydomain.com to send and receive my messages but to take advantage of the Gmail technologies I just have to create a Gmail account and setup that account to filter the SPAM out of my other e-mail addresses like (myname@mydomain.com) for free. This has an advantage over local adaptive filters to fight SPAM like the one package with Thunderbird that is the number of active users in Gmail help Gmail learn about SPAM messages faster and better and most of the time, before they arrive at you mailbox. Although the adaptive filter within Thunderbird is quite good at fighting SPAM, is alone at that task, it can only learn from you while the Gmail SPAM filter learn from everybody using the system.

So let’s setup Gmail into action and use the service to clean our mail boxes out  of SPAM.

First we create a free account in Gmail like (myname@gmail.com). Then we have to configure this account to allow for POP connections from other e-mail clients like Thunderbird, just follow this instructions. Then we have to setup our e-mail clients like Thunderbird or Outlook to login into Gmail and download the messages from there, this way we don’t have to visit http://mail.google.com, we just open the Thunderbird app and the e-mail gets delivered to our PC.

The next step is o create some accounts and filters in Thunderbird to organize the incoming messages into folders because in my case, I use about 10 different e-mails addresses and I don’t want everything mixed up on the same incoming folder, you can skip this but I recommend it to everyone. Say I have (email1@domain1.com) plus (email2@domain2.com) etc, I just create the accounts for these e-mails and then for each one a filter in the Thunderbird Gmail account to move the messages from each address to the respective folder. Don’t forget that from now on Thunderbird will only download e-mail from the Gmail account but will send from any account or address.

Once Thunderbird is setup, we can safely redirect all e-mails from all accounts we have to that Gmail address (myname@gmail.com). Gmail will check every message for SPAM and will only let go to Thunderbird clean messages, at least 99% of the time, I still get a few messages out of Gmail everyday that Thunderbird SPAM filter hapily eats out of my inbox so I basically get close to nome messages daily.

So from now on, all e-mail messages coming to our addresses, go to Gmail first to clean the dirty SPAM and then are returned to us by Gmail into Thunderbird clean and sweet.

Let’s see:

1) - Create a Gmail account like (myname@gmail.com).

2) - Activate Gmail’s POP funtionality.

3) - Setup Thunderbird to fetch all e-mails from that account.

4) - Setup a filter in Thunderbird to organize the incoming messages into the respective folders.

5) - Setup a Redirect or Forward on all e-mail addresses that we want to use to the (myname@gmail.com) address.

That’s it, enjoy!

When someone send me an e-mail to (myname@olhodepeixe.pt) our mail server redirects that message to (myname@gmail.com). Google filters the SPAM and the clean messages get back through Thunderbird that automatically sorts the messages into respective folders, see? Gmail is cleaning the SPAM from our e-mail messages.

This way we can keep using our e-mail addresses like (myname@mydomain.com) and no one knows that the messages go through Gmail for a clean out.

We still recommend everyone to check the Gmail service once in a while to report SPAM messages that trick the system and also have a look at false positives although this is very rare and only happens to those sending lot’s of messages that eventually someone get’s annoyed and marks has SPAM.

Another nice app to install is Google Talk, it notifies of incoming messages and also can send instant messages to other Gmail users.

Those with only a couple custom e-mail addresses and that like to use Gmail in the browser (also quite good interface) can use the Gmail to clean SPAM and don’t even have to use Thunderbird, just setup those e-mail addresses on Gmail and configure the sending and receiving preferences, that’s it, so simple.

UPDATE July 2008: We have been using this system for about six months now on all e-mail addresses from our company and we can report that is is very effective nailing the SPAM we receive to almost zero. To be precise, each e-mail sent to use has to pass tree SPAM filters before reaching us, first is the SPAM ASSASSIN filter running in the web server, many messages pass this filter because we can’t set it to be too aggressive or we will start to loose some messages with silly subjects or crazy e-mail addresses, etc, some messages pass this filter but get marked *** SPAM *** before being delivered to Gmail. The Gmail filter cleans most of the SPAM for us, a dozen messages get by the Gmail SPAM filter but there is a third SPAM filter to kill those messages, it is the Thunderbird adaptive SPAM filter that hapilly eats those messages and we usually never see SPAM messages. I have to manually delete about one or two mesages daily ot of 2000 to 5000 sent to us every day, wow!!!