My youth group e-mail address gets a lot of spam, so much that I avoid checking it until I have to just because I hate sifting through all the junk. (Seriously, how many different ways can there possibly be to spell viagra?) So, yesterday I decided to do something about it.

Gmail provides an excellent spam mail filter for its users, one of the best filters available in the market. There’s no need to “train” the filter to detect what’s spam and what’s legit like some filters, it just works. Since I only use my current Gmail account for sign-ups and registrations on websites, it gets bombarded with a ton of junk, but not once in the year that I’ve been using Gmail has it incorrectly filtered a message. That’s pretty good odds! The best part is that Gmail accounts are available for free, so this filtering system is available to anyone who wants it.

For my youth group e-mail address, I wanted the power of Gmail’s spam filters without having to switch e-mail address in order to start using Gmail’s spam filtering system. Thankfully, with Gmail’s POP e-mail service, I was able to do so. Here’s how:

Step-by-step Process

1. I signed up for a new Gmail account to use for filtering youth group e-mail. (Register here for new users. Current users should send themselves an invitation through Gmail.)
2. Then I set my current youth group e-mail address to automatically forward all mail to the new Gmail address I just created.
3. Next, in Gmail I clicked on “Settings” and then the “Forwarding and POP” tab. There I enabled POP for all email and set it to archive Gmail’s copy of mail.



4. After that, I clicked on the “Accounts” tab and “Add another e-mail address” and filled out the pop-up box that appeared with my name and current youth group e-mail address. When I completed the address verification, I set this address as default and selected the option to always reply from this default address.



5. Finally, I set up my e-mail client (Evolution, in my case, since I use Ubuntu Linux) using the guide Gmail provides.*

*The only downside of sending mail through Gmail (either with a client or through webmail) is that your Gmail address will be included in the e-mail headers of the sender field in order to help prevent your mail from being marked as spam. Most email clients do not display the sender field, though some versions of Microsoft Outlook may display, “From customaddress@domain.com on behalf of yourusername@gmail.com.” If you feel like you need to avoid this, set your e-mail client to check for new messages (incoming mail server) from Gmail, but leave outgoing mail the same (set to use your domain’s/ISP’s/company’s outgoing mail server information).

Youth group e-mail is now spam free! I can always log in to my Gmail account to check any trapped spam messages, but that’s pretty unnecessary.

[tags]Gmail, spam filter, email tools[/tags]

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