One of my (many) email addresses gets massive amounts of spam. From HOT RUSIAN GIRL to bogus Insurance policies to phishing bank security scams, just. So, Much. Spam.
The thing is, I don’t want to get rid of that email address, and others like it. I’ve used it for years.
I removed it from my server a few months ago, and a dear friend freaked out as her mail to me bounced, and I was locked out of an important web service because I didn’t get mail and was not allowed to change it as it was used as the damn primary key in their database (programmers: don’t do that).
So….what to do.
Well, I went to the dark side. I am now using gmail. I
didn’t want to, but there it is.
Use Gmail
Basically, I’ve got the mail from my legacy accounts forwarding to gmail, from the Cpanel hosting settings. I no longer use the big bucket POP/IMAP account on my server, just dumbly forwards to my gmail account, but with a string appended with “+” to my username.
eg if my gmail address is daffyduck@gmail.com (it’s not, by the way), and my daffy@example.com mail is the old address to be forwarded (also not my address), I would put daffyduck+daffy.example.com@gmail.com. I could then filter mail in my gmail account, so that all mail from that domain could be tagged and put in a different view.
Then I’ve set gmail to be able to send with the old email address. You might have to do some account verification, but that should be a breeze as everything is sent to your gmail account anyway.
Gmail is so much better at filtering spam than any spam assassin setting I could do on the server. Plus I get to unify all my accounts to check in one place.
I do hope that Google doesn’t do anything dodgy with my email. They wouldn’t do evil, would they?