Tiger Mail Filter - getting subject to work on *base text* (including character encoding strings?)

[Steven Hatfield]

On Apr 18, 2008, at 4:17 PM, Jim Witte wrote:

> I'm really tempted to just run all my mail through gMail - I've  
> heard it's spam filtering is pretty good

Funny you should mention that... I've been meaning to share this  
success story for a while...

I have a mail server that I run (on Mac OS X client, no less!) that  
for years has hosted my family's email accounts. Unfortunately, the  
spam had gotten too much for me and my family, so I started devising a  
way to eliminate spam as much as possible.

I too had heard that GMail's spam filter was good, so I thought I'd  
try an experiment...

Since I recently purchased a MacBook Pro (which I use all day at  
work), I needed some way to sync it with my Mac at home.  I ended up  
buying the family version of .MAC, which gave me an account to use as  
my "home" account. It's the one that I give to friends and family;  
everyone else gets an account on my "old" domain.

Then I edited the mail server's "aliases" file, where I had been  
storing a ton of aliases in my fight against spam, and redirected  
every alias that I had created to a new GMail account that I created  
just for this purpose.

Then I set up GMail to auto-forward messages in my inbox to my  
new .MAC account.  Fortunately GMail "weeds" spam before it does this.

So I get this:

<Old Email Address> -> GMail -> <New Email Address>

The results were even better than I had hoped, because while  
Mail.app's junk filter is "good", GMail's spam filter is "AMAZING"!

Now I just check my .MAC account, and life is goooooood!  I get maybe  
3 or 4 spam messages (out of THOUSANDS) every week.

So I suggest you give this a try, it really is the way to go.

Have fun, and good luck!
-Steven

PS: Sometimes I worry about the privacy implications of giving all of  
my email to GMail. Then I remember that email itself is insecure, and  
sigh a sigh of relief that I don't get email that is too personal :-)