Spam continues to plague the internet despite numerous attempts by service providers to stop it. As anyone who has been active online for more than 10 minutes will confirm, spam is an ongoing nightmare with no end in sight.

With over 20 domains under my control, each with it’s own email address, I’ve seen spam in my inbox grow from a minor annoyance to a real pain in the backside that awaits me each time I boot my Powerbook.

Apple’s mail application, even after a reasonable time in learning mode, is not aggressive nor accurate enough to offer a real solution. White listing, a process where only email from a known and pre approved source is downloaded, is a powerful but heavy handed approach. It works, up to a point, but any first contact emails, perhaps from new clients or even people who have recently changed their email addresses, are blocked. White listing systems can be programmed to request confirmation from the sender but this can often lead to confusion or even frustration and result in the sender, who could be a potential client, not complying.

Enter Gmail. Google’s free email system. I was lucky enough to grab a Gmail address back in the early days of the service but only recently started using it, not as an email address, but as a collection point for all my other email. One thing that struck me after a few days use was Gmails ability to eliminate 99% of spam. And since all my email was being collected by it all I had to do was configure Apple mail to download my messages from Gmail using the remote access settings, rather than from the original source.

This gives me the best of both worlds. Spam free email that is accessible anywhere online via gmail.com as well as a downloaded copy in my chosen email application. I can still use whatever send from address I like by changing the settings in both Gmail and Apple mail so the system remains transparent. The settings are detailed on Gmail’s support pages and are easy to implement.

At the end of 2007 I was regular getting over 500 spam emails a day. 500 that made it through the filters I had in place and another 1000 or so that got caught by Apple mail and were deleted. Now I still get sent an increasing amount of junk but no more than 10 offending messages get through each day.

And clicking delete 10 times a day is much better than having to click it 500 times.