Poor Man's Spam Filtering Solution

As I stated 107 days ago, the amount of Spam that I receive is increasing each month. I am using SpamSieve on the client side but this approach still requires me to download the spam and allow Apple's Mail Program to throw it away. While this does save me time, a better approach would be to catch it further up stream. There are modules that I could plug into my mail server to do so but I've found a fairly effective approach that requires little work on my end and zero maintenance.

Steps to drastically reduce spam

• Configure my mail server to forward all of my mail to my gmail account
• Configure Apple mail to grab my mail from gmail via pop3
• Leave my mail server as the default smtp server for this account so people don't get confused on which address I'm using.

With this solution, gmail becomes my spam filtering software by moving spam to a special folder that doesn't get retrieved via pop3 access. Not to mention it does one heck of job filtering. This solution also has the added benefit of me being able to view my mail online until I pop it down from gmail. Another plus is that no mail gets lost, I can always look in gmail's spam folder to make sure something didn't get marked as spam incorrectly.

 

UPDATE: It has now been about two days and I've already concluded that this is a great solution. So far Gmail has caught just under 300 spam messages with zero false positives and SpamSieve has only had to catch 6 locally. Thanks Google for filtering my spam!