I use DreamHost to host this website as well as a few others. One of the biggest problems I’ve had while at Dreamhost is the terrible spam filtering they offer. Their version of SpamAssassain is both out of date and “hands-off”. Unless you go through hoops to install your own version on their servers, you are out of luck. I’ve spent so much time filtering my junk mail to make sure the real mail didn’t get caught, that I probably shouldn’t have bothered filtering at all.

In searching, I came across a really good idea on Justin Blanton’s site… use Gmail as a spam filter. I was really hoping that this would work, because I’ve never seen a spam message hit my Gmail inbox.

I use PocoMail as my desktop mail client, so the first version of this HowTo is going to be about configuring a Desktop Mail client ( Outlook, PocoMail, etc) How to go about it?

Using a Desktop Mail Client ( Outlook, Thunderbird, Pocomail )

This is my preferred way of accessing my email. I don’t particularly travel around much, and I use a laptop for everything, so it’s rarely a problem. It’s useful to be able to check your email from remote locations, but it’s not a regular thing for me. Seriously, stop the email addiction already!

This method turned out to be the easiest to implement… nearly a no-brainer. First, you need to create a throwaway Gmail account. I’ll leave that part up to you. Next, you need to go into Dreamhost’s control panel and turn off the spam filtering if you already have it on. Navigate to Mail \ Junk Filter and make sure your setting looks like this:

If you don’t turn off the DreamHost spam filtering, it will continue to block legit mail…. and our goal is to never check it again.

Next, you’ll want to navigate to Mail \ Manage Email and click the “Edit” link on your email address in the list. Here’s where you get to forward a copy of your mail over to Gmail for spam filtering. The screen should look something like this when you are through:

You can choose whether or not to make this a forwarding-only account or not. If you do make this a forwarding account, then you will have to send outbound email via Gmail’s SMTP server. It’s really up to you if that’s what you feel like doing.

Alright, now that we have that set up, emails will start flowing into your Gmail account from your normal email address, and the spam will magically be filtered. Life is definitely improving! But we still need to get our email from Gmail…. so head on over to your Gmail account, and go into the settings panel. Click either of the “Enable POP…” links, and hit Save Changes:

Now, our spam filtering is nearly finished. The only problem is that our desktop mail client is downloading from the old Spam-filled Dreamhost email servers, instead of our shiny new inbox free of junk mail. Good thing this will be a minor change! All we need to do is change our Incoming mail server to these settings:

Incoming Server: pop.gmail.com

Username: yourgmailaddress@gmail.com

Password: duh?

SSL / TLS / Enable Secure Connection: Yes!

Port: 995

All of these settings are available on Google’s POP Access page in their Help Center.… You could just read those, but I’ve got screenshots!

For PocoMail:

For Outlook Mail:

This is for Outlook 2003. If you are using anything older than that, then you are already wasting your time and you deserve junk mail. You can leave now.

For the rest of you, go into Tools \ Accounts, click your POP email account, and hit the Change button. You’ll see this screen, where you can enter in your Gmail information:

One thing that you will need to change, and this is important… Click the More Settings button, and click the checkbox for SSL on the advanced tab. The port should default to 995, which is the right port.

I still use the Dreamhost servers for sending email outbound, so I didn’t change my outbound server. You can also use the Gmail SMTP server if you feel like it.

So there you are. You are now free of spam. In 2 days of having this setup, I’ve seen 200 emails end up in the Gmail spam filter, without a single false-positive. I am feeling a little bit of sadness, though, because I really enjoyed bitching about all the spam. Now I have to go and find something legitimate to bitch about….

Note: I’ve been asked by a few of the people that I work with to help them setup Gmail spam filtering for their webmail client, so check back for Part 2 of the series soon, where I’ll laugh at SquirrelMail’s name.