The Final Word on Spam
And that word is…
Spam is so pervasive that this is my 3rd article about some aspect of it. And it should be my last article about spam because I’ve stopped mine. And you can stop yours.
Here’s how, in one word: Gmail. Sign up for a free Gmail account from Google. Your spam will stop. (My definition of “stop”: The spam folder in my Gmail account gets from 300 to 500 spam emails each day. In my regular Gmail email box I get one spam message every two to three days. In my book, that’s “stopped.”)
Google employs many automated processes to identify spam, but the best thing they do isn’t even automated. When I receive a spam email that wasn’t caught by the automation, I select it and press the “Report Spam” button. It disappears, but behind the scenes a record of that email is retained. My one report of a spam message does little, but when thirty or forty thousand people like me report an email that we all received, Google knows to tag it. Hundreds of thousands of Gmail users all work together to identify the spam emails that slip through the filters, then Google uses the content, falsified headers, transfer info, and the rest of the technical data about the spam and the spammers sending path to fine-tune the filters. Gmail fights the spammers (and wins) on Google’s favorite turf – the technological front.
I’ll go further about my experience with my Gmail account: I have almost two dozen email addresses for several businesses and organizations where I send and receive email: I’m “marc” and “info” and “admin” and a few other names at “silvermarc.com,” “manhattanbni.com,” “cointracking.com,” “xyzservers.com,” “nyartifax.com,” “metromac.org,” “esrara.org,” and “woodhull.org,” to name a few. My desk computer can easily access all of these accounts in one fell swope, and all of the emails landed in my desktop email app. But from a cell phone or PDA this became troublesome. I’d have to access each online mail server for each entity, it would be quite a task.
Instead, I have every single email address forward directly into my Gmail account. From my iPhone I access one webmail server – Gmail’s Mobile server – and all of my email is accessed – one stop shopping from my mobile device or from my desk.
Gmail also permits you to send out email without forcing you to “advertise” that you’re using Gmail – you can send Gmail that lists your business or favorite domain as the “from” address. I send everything through Gmail and it all shows as originating from “silvermarc.com” or whatever domain name I need to use. Google doesn’t feel the need to prove to the world that people are using their service, apparently they feel that by providing exemplary service they’ll prove to the users that they understand their needs.
Here’s the link to Google:
I was not one of the people who participated in Google’s unusual IPO stock auction, and I never bought stock in the company. I have no ulterior motives to speak so highly of my experience with Gmail, in fact, I use several of their unique services and never paid ’em a dime! (Google Maps, Google Notebook, Image Search, Google Groups, Google Calendar…)
How do they do it at no cost to us? Perhaps I’ll chat about that in an upcoming post.
Enjoy! (And simplify your online life with Gmail!)
–Marc
January 14, 2008 @ 10:00 AM