Friends have been recommending passing my Lockergnome email account(s) through Gmail for effective spam filtering. I spent a while last night setting things up according to their instructions. Essentially, you dive into your Gmail account and set it up to download emails from your regular ol’ POP3 mail provider. It scrubs your account, and you set up your desktop email client to download from pop3.gmail.com rather than your regular ol’ POP3 provider. This is completely FREE for anybody to do.

In theory, this is an awesome idea. In practice, it’s already been a huge “time suck” for me in the 12 hours I’ve had it set up.

I never liked Gmail’s Web interface, and I’m pretty much forced to use it in order to manage the spam and clear out false positives. This may be perfectly fine for most people, but I can get hundreds of junk emails within a few hours – so Web-based management for me is damn near impractical.

• Why POP3 and not IMAP for Gmail? At least then, I could have access to various folders from anywhere (rather than labels that are only manageable on gmail.com.

• There’s no “probability of spam” percentage point attributed to any flagged message, so a 100% spam-probability is lumped in with a 2% spam-probability. SpamBayes for Outlook spoiled me.
• There are no sorting options in Gmail, enabling me to sort by any given field in my spam “folder” (like From, Subject, etc.).
• I don’t want to see Chinese emails – ever. Why can’t I at least have this encoding filter set up somewhere in my profile?
• I can’t access the spam “folder” anywhere else (like from the iPhone, for example).
• I have to go directly into the spam “folder” on Gmail.com before I can actually empty it – no right-clicking a link or pressing a button from anywhere outside of it. Bleah.

I might be willing to turn on Gmail spam filtering when I’m away from home for short periods of time – knowing full well that I’d face thousands of messages upon returning home, likely peppered with false positives. Problem is, there’s no easy way to toggle the polling of external mail accounts in Gmail – they’re either active or deleted. A workaround might be to change the stored password to something else so that nothing is actually retrieved, but still…

Google recently acquired Postini, but even with some of the aforementioned filters – it was still largely unwieldy and unmanageable for me to use (though I haven’t touched it for years). These solutions don’t save me any time – because I still have to sort for false positives. That’s a gigantic pain in the ASCII, and I’d much rather do it locally. I realize it takes time to train spam filters, but… ergh, that’s not my complaint.

This spam problem is getting worse, not better. Google has a piecemeal solution, at best.