Using a Gmail Account in Conjunction with Your AntiSpam Program as the Perfect Spam Folder   12/13/2007 - 1,363 views, 1 Comment

First, set up a Gmail account (sign up for Gmail here). If you already have a Gmail mail account, create a different one, which you will use as a spam folder only.

Next, have your spam filtering program forward all of the email it detects as spam to your new Gmail spam folder account. We use the awesome Mail-Filters program, which checks our email for spam before it ever gets to us, but lots of different spam filtering programs will now allow you to send all of the detected spam to one particular address.

Now, whenever you check Gmail (that is, your Gmail spam folder account), you will be able to easily scan the contents of your spam folder to determine if there is any email you actually want. You won’t have to rely on the subject, or the name of the sender, because Gmail shows you the first lines of the email contents, without your ever having to open the email. You can just scan down the list of emails in the folder!

Here is a screen capture of my Gmail spam folder account, to show you how well it works:

See how easy it is to determine whether email is spam - even email that looks like it could be legitimate - by checking the first line or so of the content of the email?

With this set-up, you can just leave a browser window open to your Gmail spam account, and quickly and easily check to make sure that you are not missing any wanted email that was accidentally tagged as spam.