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.

• Blog Comment Spammers
• Todd Friesen – Confessions of a Reformed Spammer
• Windows Security Software
• Spam Musubi Recipe
• Have You Ever Tasted McSpam?
• Spam Increases Along with Security Issues
• Top-Rated Firewall Back by Request
• Stop Spam from Reaching Your Computer
• Is Spam ever Going Away?
• How Many Emails Do You Get Every Day?

A few moments ago, I received a comment notifcation for a post I made a couple of years ago (which must rank well in Google for it to be noticed today). The comment turned out to be spam for An HDTV Reminder. I get hundreds of spam comments every day. In fact, my installation of WordPress claims: “Akismet has caught 227,338 spam for you since you first installed it.” Yikes!

This one, however, definitely slipped through (emphasized in red):

Author : Diana (IP: 217.17.88.78 , clients-217-17-88-78.mikrovisata.net)
E-mail : servemail@8080mail.info
URI : www.hdtv.***************.info/
Whois : ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=217.17.88.78
Comment: Please visit my site, click my ads and buy my crap

Forget about claiming that .INFO domains are registered for nothing other than spam sites – this is probably the one of the funniest pieces of blog spam I’ve ever recieved! I almost approved it, based on the hearty guffaw it elicited.

• Todd Friesen – Confessions of a Reformed Spammer
• Gmail Spam Management Doesn’t Go Far Enough
• Akismet Lacks Essential Features
• Windows Security Software
• Spam Musubi Recipe
• Have You Ever Tasted McSpam?
• Spam Increases Along with Security Issues
• Top-Rated Firewall Back by Request
• Stop Spam from Reaching Your Computer
• Is Spam ever Going Away?