I decided recently to re-configure the way I use my POP3 email with my website hosting account and Gmail. Previously, I just had an alias forward to my @gmail.com address. I use Gmail’s web interface for email so I configured Gmail to reply from my @goaliegirl.com address by default, so it was seamless. With this method, Gmail’s spam filter was really effective. I rarely got spam, and if I did the “Report Spam” feature pretty much made sure that type of spam (and you can usually tell by the subject) never came back. However, the problem with doing it that way was that my POP3 account on my host would fill up.
Now, that said, my host does have a configuration option to delete any mail older than X days, but for some reason it didn’t seem to work. I have a cheap host, and while they’re really good at responding, sometimes they screw up other things on my account while trying to fix something. I decided to leave it alone and just try to reconfigure a different way.
I removed the alias forwarding to Gmail and configured Gmail to pull from my POP3 account instead. Gmail can delete the messages off the server after they’re downloaded, so that will take care of the possible space problem. Everything should be groovy, right?
Well, it’s not. Now I get anywhere from 20-30 spam a day, minimum, in my Gmail account and no amount of clicking checkboxes and Reporting Spam will help. Since Gmail’s spam filter was working previously with the alias, this leads me to believe that Gmail’s spam filter does not check downloaded mail from POP3 accounts.
I would love to verify this with a different host.
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