New Solution to Junk Email Problem

I have always had a real problem with all the junk email that I receive.

Lately it has just been getting worse... 

I tried bluebottle.com with their challenge response email and I thought I liked it at first, but the problem is that there are some emails that I want to get that the company or person will not click on the link.

So this means that I have to end up going to the site and searching through the junk mail anyway.

It does work pretty good if you know you don't want to read anything that is sent there if the person does not reply to the challenge response email that is sent to them.

For example if your just posting your email address on a website or something like that, then it works great.

But then I made the mistake of using it to contact some customer service departments and a couple other things like that. These people don't answer the reply email they get so now I have to search through the junk to see if there is one of these emails in there.

Then bluebottle started charging for their free email, and inbox.com came out with the exact same service for free, so I thought about switching to inbox.com

But then I read someone talking about how great Google Gmail was...

I didn't think a whole lot about it until I looked in one of my old gmail accounts and there were a dozen messages or so in my inbox, and there were a few thousand in the spam folder.

Then I started thinking hey, that was pretty good.

I checked Gmails site and found this:

http://www.google.com/mail/help/fightspam/spamexplained.html

Community clicks

Gmail users play an important role in keeping spammy messages out of millions of inboxes. When the Gmail community votes with their clicks to report a particular email as spam, our system quickly learns to start blocking similar messages. The more spam the community marks, the smarter our system becomes.
Quick adaptation

The same advanced computing infrastructure that powers Google search also tunes our spam filters. As new spam data is released, the scale of Google's computer network allows us to quickly modify Gmail's spam-fighting algorithms. It's often a matter of minutes between the time a spammer sends out a new type of junk mail and when it's blocked from Gmail accounts.

So they actually listen to what people are telling them, and then react fast enough to make it work.

I can also use a pop3 email client to collect my email on my desktop, which is so much faster.

So I am setting up a junk email account on Gmail and I am going to try it out to see how it works at keeping all the spam I don't want to read out of my inbox.

June 23, 2009