Today, I fixed Email

My email, me@askthefool.com has been plastered all over the internet over the past four years. I get an inordinate amount of junk mail. I’m not talking about the typical 5-10 pieces a day, but rather 600-700 pieces of junk mail an hour. I usually check my email about 15-20 times a day and always turn on Outlook to see a “downloading 3 of 323 new messages” of which one, maybe two pieces of mail are important. Well, I’ve found a solution.

Google’s Gmail. Gmail allows me to dig through my old mail easily and efficiently and more importantly has a fantastic spam filter. So, I configured my server to redirect all incoming mail for me@askthefool.com to askthefool@gmail.com. Then I configured Microsoft Outlook with Gmail’s POP3 and bam, no more junk mail. Sure not a single piece of spam got through Gmail, but I wasn’t completely satisfied.

It’s seemingly unprofessional to use free email accounts and furthermore it may confuse people that email me. If they send a message to me@askthefool.com and get a reply a few days later from askthefool@gmail.com they may not put the two together. Well, I figured I could just set the reply-to address and the outgoing address will appear to be me@askthefool.com, but Gmail overwrites the outgoing header and sets the outgoing-header to askthefool@gmail.com.

So, then considering my options, I realized I could easily get around this. I have my own dedicated server and I have my own SMTP server already setup. All I had to was use my own server as my outgoing server, and use mail.gmail.com as my incoming sever.

Works unbelievably well. No need for complicated bayesian spam filters which inevitably end up deleting some important email nor a new email address. My email is still me@askthefool.com, just I no longer have spam. If you don’t have a Gmail account yet and need an invite contact me.

All you spam robots, I dare you to spam me. me@askthefool.com, fuckers. I have Google on my side. Damn it feels good to be a gangsta consumer. (I recently watched Office Space)