Using Gmail as a Spam Filter on MediaTemple
Thanks to the again beautiful work of Gmail, and another freely available service, we can use Gmail’s now very effective spam filter for our own private email. You can actually filter incoming email with Gmail, and send outgoing using your own servers. Whammy! In our case, we’re happily hosted on MediaTemple’s Dedicated Virtual, and accessing our account using Plesk, but you should be able to achieve the same results on any hosting account. Here’s how:
1. Setup your free Gmail account.
The address really doesn’t matter, as this will be transparent to anyone sending or receiving from you. Visit Gmail.com, click “Sign Up for Gmail” in the bottom right.
2. Setup Gmail account for POP access.
- When in your new gmail account, Goto Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP
- Click the radio button: ““
- Click “Save Changes”
3. Configure your email client’s incoming mail
We are using Outlook in our example here. Also, we’ll be using john@domain.com for our private address, and john@gmail.com for our gmail address, apologies to the real john@gmail.com.
Create your new email account within Outlook:
- Goto Tools -> EMail Accounts
- Add New Email Account.
- Type: POP3
Our Settings:
- Name: Type your full name “John Wayne”
- Email Address: Your private address “john@domain.com”
- Incoming Server: pop.gmail.com
- Ougoing Server: (Whatever you use for your outgoing SMTP server) if using mediatemple, it’s mail.domain.com
- username: Gmail address “john@gmail.com”
- password: Gmail password
POP Settings
4. Configure your email client’s outgoing mail
- Click on “More Settings”
- Click on the “Outgoing Server” tab, enter your smtp (private mail server) connection info (not your gmail info):
Outgoing Server
- Click on the “Advanced Tab”
- This is where the magic happens, Gmail requires authentification, and the port should be “995″
- While the outgoing info will depend on your server setup. If on Mediatemple’s Gridserver (gs), the port will be 587, while if on the Dedicated Virtual (dv), leave it at the default port 25.
Advanced Email Settings
- Click “Ok” to save out of there.
5. Forward/Redirect all incoming mail to Gmail.
Usually this is done through your hosting control panel.
- In plesk, goto your domain -> Mail
- Click on your email address
- Click on “Redirect”
- Enter your Gmail address here.
Voila, you’re done.