How to avoid spam, whatever your email address

I’m almost sweltering in the heat of a late burst of good weather here in southern England but staying cool because I finally implemented the neatest trick to keep all my email inboxes virtually spam free (thanks for nudging me in the right direction on this, Colin)

Colin (who runs the Scoophost system through which sciscoop.com is hosted) suggested that rather than relying on spam filters that wait until you’ve downloaded your email before putting them in the trashcan, a much more effective approach to spam is to re-route all your email through Google Mail and let it take care of the spam. Set your Gmail account to allow pop3 downloads and add this account to your email program and then you get all your legitimate email much faster without having to wait for spam to download alongside it.

The spam messages, by the way, simply accumulate in the spam box on your Gmail account. A quick once a week scan allows you to spot any false positives, but the rest get automatically deleted every 30 days.

It’s a simple solution and one that has cut my spam overload from several hundred a day on a dozen email accounts, to just half a dozen so far this week. Thanks again Colin.

If you also have SpamPal running the Bayesian plugin then that catches any of the remaining detritus and filters it to your local spam folder, leaving your inbox almost pristine.

I’m going to miss those messages offering me a bigger, longer, firmer, slimmer, faster, slower, shorter, tigher, younger, bits. Not!