Fighting Spam
This blog and my wife’s @artefxdesign.com domain are hosted at HostGator. I think I am getting good service for the price that I pay. Like many hosting companies, HostGator provides me with Spam Assassin to aid in the war on spam. Unfortunately (a) I can get between 100 and 300 spam messages in one day and (b) Spam Assassin is not easily configured so it doesn’t keep up with the latest spammer techniques.
A ton of spam was finding my inbox and I was getting tired of dealing with it.
I have had a Gmail account for quite some time and guess what?!? Almost no spam! While reading the Gmail documentation, I learned that Google is also looking for and blocking viruses. Bonus! After conversations with local computer geeks, I decided to try an experiment to see if I could kill (or at least wound) the monster that was dumping garbage into my inbox.
I wanted to forward all of my e-mail to my Gmail account and let Google deal with my spam. HostGator gives customers the ability to create e-mail forwarding rules but by default, it will still deliver the messages to the mailboxes on HostGator’s server. To stop that delivery, I had to delete my e-mail account configured in HostGator’s system. Deleting my e-mail account had no affect on my Gmail forwarding rules. HostGator will now forward all of my e-mail to Gmail and it will not retain any copies of the messages.
At this point, my Gmail account was receiving my @gmail.com e-mail and all of the e-mail sent to my other addresses. Cool. Any e-mail that I responded to using Gmail would be sent from my @gmail.com e-mail account. I wanted responses to be sent from the e-mail address that received the original message. Google has a solution for this: Adding a custom ‘From’ address.
Follow the steps to add additional e-mail addresses to your Gmail account. Google will send you verification e-mails to make sure you actually control each address. Once you are verified, you can then go back to the settings and tell Gmail to automatically use the address to which a message was sent.
Next I reconfigured my e-mail client to access my Gmail account via IMAP. I configured the client to download all of the messages automatically. I do this so I can have an offline copy that can be searched and Time Machine can make backups.
So far, Gmail is doing an awesome job blocking spam. It is working so well that set up the whole family, including my mom, with the same configuration using their own Gmail accounts.























