Show and Tell Thursday – Using gmail as a spam filter

No code this week, no time what with the release this morning and washing machines blowing up earlier in the week.

So instead a tip. It’s something which I have mentioned to a few people and they seemed to think it was an interesting idea for those of us running home Domino servers for email.

In the control panel application of my main mail domain I have it set up to forward all of the mail received to be forwarded on to my gMail account. In gMail I then have it set up to forward all mail that it receives on to a different, undisclosed email address which is hosted on my home server.

So why would I do this? Well there are two main reasons…

1) I don’t need to worry about spam filtering as gMail handles that for me. gMail doesn’t have the best spam filtering in the world but it’s getting better and it will only forward on mail which it doesn’t think is spam, so my home Domino configuration can remain nice and simple.

2) I have a backup of my mail for when my home server is not accessable during network outages or, in the worst case, if the server dies completely.

There are downsides to this approach, all mail that I receive has the flag to identify suspicious mail in the new ND7 mail template, but I have just hidden that column in my Inbox so it doesn’t bother me. When I’m sending mail from the Notes client, to make it come from my "real" email address I need to have my Location document set with the correct "Internet mail address".

Other than that it has been a really successful set up for me over the last few months.

Now all you admins out there can start to pick holes! (Actually I am serious about that, if there are obvious flaws which I have missed I’d love to know them please).