Internet Marketing Toolbox

As part of my semi-regular “analysis” of the spam I receive, I was totally shocked to find over 1260 messages in my junk mail folder for the last eight days. I really need to do something effective, because this is getting totally out of control!

Looking at my various email accounts that received spam (16 main POP accounts, with multiple aliases for each one), I tried to decide whether I could kill off any of them that I no longer use… When I found one that was responsible for 365 of them, that old alias was promptly deleted!

But that STILL leaves almost 100 spam emails a day for me to deal with!

THEN I remembered my Gmail account… and found yet ANOTHER 300 odd messages that had been trapped by Google’s spam filters in the last week alone…

But what REALLY excited me about this was that NONE of these junk emails made it to my email client!

Google was sending me ONLY the good stuff!

Perhaps here is the answer you need…

So here’s what I did (and this assumes you already have a Gmail account established AND configured on your email client to send and receive messages):

1. For starters… pick just one of the email accounts you are using. Take note of the username, password and POP mail server settings, then DISABLE this account in your email client. Turn it OFF so you no longer check for mail from your email client (you are going to set it up on Gmail instead, and let THEM look after everything, including the spam)

2. Now, login to your Gmail account and click on SETTINGS (top RH corner)

3. Select the ACCOUNTS tab, and from that, click on the “Add another mail account” link.

4. I entered my email address, and then Google asked for the server settings (from #1 above)… I also marked the “label” option to make it easier to see where mail comes from when I am using Gmail,

5. And that’s it! Once I set it up, it checked the mail!

And the good thing?

Of the thirteen messages that were waiting, Google put 11 in the spam folder straight away, and left 2 good ones in my Gmail inbox.

Next.. over to my email client, and clicked “get mail” from my Gmail account to see what happens…

And the two messages that were destined for me, actually arrived in my inbox… and NO SPAM!

Yay!

Google allows you to do this with up to FIVE pop email accounts. If you have more than that, you’re going to have to do a little fiddling (i.e. email redirecting/forwarding) at cpanel level to send the email to a different address for Gmail to collect it… in fact, why not just forward it straight to your gmail account?

Once your email client checks your Gmail inbox, the messages are transferred to the “trash” folder at Gmail, and held there for 30 days before automatic removal. So if you need to go back over some recent history, these archived messages may be useful…

WARNING - VERY IMPORTANT STEP - DO NOT MISS THIS!

Check your Gmail spam folder regularly after you have done this - at least once a day for the first few weeks!!! Look for any GOOD email that might “slip through” the filters… If you find any, mark it as “Not Spam” so that Gmail can learn what is good!

Now I’m off to set up a few more of my busier accounts!!!

And as soon as I do that… I will have stopped over 900 of those spam emails from getting to me in the first place!!!!

So there you go… a VERY effective way of combating spam!

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