It’s finally happened, after 4 years my @scamcity.co.uk address has succumbed to the plague of the spammers. It never used to be that bad, a couple here, a couple there, but last night between 7pm and 11pm, 2,000+…
Something had to be done…
Now I had thought about using Google’s hosted mail service for sometime, especially as the webmail provided by Dreamhost, well, to put it bluntly, sucks ass. But instead I opted for what I call Google Lite.
You see, while I wanted all the features of Gmail and the incredible spam filtering it does, I didn’t really want to hand over my mail completely, I still like my IMAP setup which Google, for all the good they do, don’t do… POP or Gmail only. So what I did was this, I converted my old email address into a forwarding address, so my previous forwards forward to this forward which forwards it to my Gmail account, then I set up a filter in Gmail that when an email reaches the inbox with an @scamcity.co.uk in the to field, it then gets forwarded to a whole new email address, so all the spam (in theory) gets caught up in Gmail and kept there.
So now I can also say I have double backups of emails, in my IMAP account and now in my Gmail account, should anything horrific happen one day. Plus I get the added bonus of the mail notification in Google Talk, and I can send mail FROM scamcity.co.uk (well, in Outlook it comes up as “on behalf of”) in Gmail. The best of both worlds.
Hopefully I can now live my days happy and as spam free as possible.