Using Gmail as a Spam Filter
I set up an adaptation of this last night for my domain here. So far, after 12 hours, I’ve received 73 messages, 61 of which were SPAM, and Gmail caught 57 of those. It also has claimed 3 false positives, which is a problem.
There are some downfalls to using Gmail like this. Mainly, if Gmail flags a message as Spam and it isn’t (a false positive), when you move the message back to your Inbox it will not forward the message to your mail account. The message is stuck in your Gmail account, with no way to move it to your mail server.
On the up side, it has cleaned my mailbox up enough that I can use the push service from Verizon to get email on my Treo without getting floods of Spam. I’m going to continue to evaluate this, and I’ll keep you posted.
*Update* After one week, I must say I’m pretty impressed. After getting three false positives the first day, I was worried that may be a problem. However, Gmail hasn’t nipped any more legit messages since then, so I’ll just assume that was an anomally. 511 messages have been flagged as SPAM the past week, and Gmail is letting around 5 messages per day slip through. That’s an acceptable ratio to me. The experiment continues…