I have been using Gmail’s web interface for quite awhile now, almost two years. Thing is, I had pretty much abandoned my Eudora installation. Every so often I’d log into it to dump my mailbox contents, but wasn’t actively using it to do my e-mail chores anymore. Gmail’s interface is nicely laid out, and very responsive–with the AJAX technology, the screen refreshes with new mail within a minute. The best part about Gmail is their spam filtering.

The spam filtering is so good at Gmail that I only get an occasional junk e-mail in my Inbox…maybe just a couple a week, if it’s a “bad” week. “Bad” is relative: I used to get dozens of junk e-mails per day in Eudora, and despite my feeding it both good and bad e-mail, it still never trained itself very well. And it clogged up my mail folders quite a bit as well. Additionally, my server has SpamAssassin installed, but it takes a lot of work to train it to identify good vs. bad mail. (You have to divert mail into “ham” and “spam” so it can learn the patterns. I just have no time for that.) And since it is server-wise, I can’t use the Bayesian filtering since what may trigger spam for me, might be valid e-mail for my clients. I have spent countless hours over the years adjusting, tweaking, installing filters, etc., and nothing seems to work. I get relief for a few weeks, then it comes back with a vengeance. Gmail’s filtering just seems to be “on” all the time–even if a burst of new spam gets through, I report it (as I’m sure most others do), and within a day or two, I don’t see it again.

To put this into perspective: about three years ago, I heard from my web host that among all the e-mail addresses on my account, I was receiving an average of 90,000 e-mail messages per day. How many of those were valid? For me, maybe a few dozen. What an incredible waste of bandwidth!

Anyway, I needed to do something about all of this junk. What I discovered is that I could use a Gmail account as an intermediate step between my mail server (on the web host) and my computer. What I do is configure a Gmail account so that it retrieve mail from my mailboxes via POP, into Gmail. (You can set up five POP accounts in Gmail to pull in your mail from your POP boxes.) Then, I use my e-mail client to retrieve the mail from Gmail via POP. The spam stays behind, and I can then peek through the spam folder occasionally to make certain that no valid mail was trapped in the spam filter. (For me, it rarely does.) This does add some delay to your mail, so I do not use it for all of my POP accounts, but otherwise it has given me a lot of relief.

If you set it up properly, your mail path now looks like this:

[Your POP3 mailbox] –> [Gmail] –> [Your e-mail client]

To set it up with Gmail, you need to do a few things.  First, click on the Settings link in the upper right corner of your Gmail window, which will get you to your account settings screen.

1. First, we are going to set up your Gmail account so you can access it via POP, to retrieve your mail using the e-mail client of your choice.  From the tabs, first click on Forwarding and POP.  For forwarding, you can leave this as disabled.  For POP Download, choose either “Enable POP for all mail (even mail that’s already been downloaded)” or “Enable POP only for mail that arrives from now on” (if you already have a lot of mail in a current Gmail account which you want to save).  For the setting “When messages are accessed with POP”, I have mine set to “delete Gmail’s copy”.  Save your changes.
2. Next, we are going to set up your Gmail account so that it retrieves mail from your existing POP3 mailboxes.  Click on the Accounts tab.  In the section “Get mail from other accounts”, you can add up to five accounts.  Click on Add account and walk through the steps to set up your account.  You will need to know your mail server name, and the username and password you use to log into that e-mail account.  What I do is leave the “Leave a copy of retrieved message on the server” unchecked, so I don’t have any problems with the mailbox filling up.
3. Finally in your e-mail client, set up your mail servers to access the POP account at Gmail, not your standard mailbox.  And there you go–you’ve got your mail filtered through Gmail!