Email semi-hosted @ Gmail

I’ve got a domain name which need to be able to receive email from (anything)@domainname.com (catch all). However, as you know already, these days it means getting a lot of spam. And by a lot I’m talking like hundreds everyday.

I’ve setup a server with all sorts of anti spam & anti virus defenses. Unfortunately, the spam is still coming through in bulk. These vermints really need to be on the receiving end sometimes, enjoying their important mailbox bombarded by torrents of cheap viagra offers. Anyway …

I got an idea 2 days ago – how about if I redirect the incoming email to a Gmail account, let Gmail kill the spam, then I can fetch the (clean) mailbox with their POP3 feature ?
Sounds good to me, since I assumed Google would have far better resources to deal with spam, and therefore able to defend their mailbox better that me.

So I setup my mailserver to redirect the incoming mail for that domain to Google, and I waited.

After a day, I got about 5 spam in my Gmail Inbox… and 300 of them in the Spam folder. Hooray ! ๐Ÿ˜€

My server loves Google too now. SpamAssassin (and others) has been torturing it for some time, especially with those massive influx of spam. Now it just redirect the whole lot, and forget about it.
And I’m happy for obvious reasons.

Kudos to Google.

19 thoughts on “Email semi-hosted @ Gmail

  1. I’ve seen this kind of trick in “Hacking GMail” book by Ben Hammersley. Published by Wiley.

  2. apa jadinya kalo isp juga nge-host imelnya disana? hihi…

  3. been using this method for a while, the problem is with the reply address not carried on and thus not properly flagged.

  4. mungkin spam berkurang, tapi bandwidth yang termakan juga jadi minimal 2x lipat untuk forwarding ke gmail lalu mengambilnya kembali. inti masalah spamming adalah bandwidth yang terbuang sia-sia.

  5. beta – I never read that book before. honestly ๐Ÿ™‚

    treespotter – I haven’t stumbled into that problem, will check. thanks for the heads up

    ryosaeba – agree, but at the moment I value my time more, so I compromised my bandwidth usage for it.

    sunaryo – I try not to be too dependent on somebody else. with this setup, it’s quick and easy to move somewhere else.

    btw; thanks for your theme (used here), Dreamhost chose it along with other themes and bundled it up with their wordpress package. well done ๐Ÿ™‚

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  7. Nice idea! Your spam problem comes from spam crawler robots. They crawl your site to add your email addresses their spam lists. Make your email addresses invisible to spam crawlers. Hide your mail addresses from robots in plain sight. Visitors to your web pages can read and click on your email addresses the same way they do now. Robots will not find them. Stay off spam lists.

  8. That is an excellent idea. I use gmail as my main email address now because of the excellent way they filter out spam. My inbox used to be cluttered. Now it’s nice checking my mail and not having hundreds of nonsense emails sitting in my inbox.

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