According to Neil, he was forwarding all his email from his primary domain name to his Gmail account and downloading the emails that Gmail said were not spam. Unfortunately, Gmail got swamped by the sheer volume of email. Neil had 1.27 MILLION emails in his spam folder, despite Gmail deleting spams that were over 30 days old. That's an average of 42,365 hitting the account every day! The spams were taking up 5.7 GB of Neil's Gmail webspace.

The real problem was that spams were slipping through the Gmail filters, and Neil was having to download them and delete them. Despite using the mail filters within Windows Mail he found its anti-spam "rules" to be clunky and difficult to use.

So Neil set up a new system, which he's very happy with. In detail, he created a third-party spam checking account and let it check the Gmail mail box. The extra account checks incoming email against Neil's whitelist of senders. Any sender who isn't on the whitelist gets sent a "challenge" email asking them to verify that they're human. Neil now downloads emails from the extra account, and only gets email from people who are either on his whitelist or who've verified themselves.

Neil also checks the extra account via a web-browser, just to make sure it's getting things right. So far it is. The stats are 190 emails processed, of which 115 were spam and 75 were good emails. So that's already saved Neil from downloading and filtering the 115 from the 75. You may be thinking why didn't Neil just miss out the Gmail account and set up the new account to get emails from the his main server. The answer is that the new account probably wouldn't be able to send out 42,365 challenge emails each day just for Neil's account! Neil also thinks that Gmail's spam filters are quite good, so it seemed to be best to leave that working and have the new account work on the Gmail-filtered emails.

It's an interesting system, designed to deal with a huge avalanche of spam. Neil thinks he's created a system which will leave him "spam free". After almost 11 years of dealing with spam, it will be a wonderful thing.