Posted 10/17/06: I signed up for Google apps for your domain a long while ago but never did anything with it. I didn’t mind if Gmail hosted the POP portion of the server but I didn’t want my outgoing mail server to show as gmail.com. We don’t host our web server or mail server in house because I have no knowledge nor do I want any. Spam was largely under control for us, but over the last 3 or 4 weeks it had really gotten out of hand. I get 60 or 70 emails a day that I need for business in my main email account and the 50-100 or so spam messages a day were really becoming a drag. Not only does it clog up Outlook, but it really hoses my Treo in box.
I bit the bullet and set up the Google service. I did test it to see if I could continue to use my own domain SMTP server and when I found that would work I set Gmail up to be my POP server. All is now quiet on the spam front. The stock alert emails and oil scams that were easily passing through Spamassasin have not found their way through the Gmail filters. Here are my mail stats for the three days that I have been using Gmail for my POP server:
- Total email messages (Spam/Not spam): 471
- Total messages caught by spam filter: 296
- Total false positives (non-spam collected by spam filter): ZERO
- Total spam messages missed by spam filter: ZERO
- Total email delivered to in box/Outlook/Treo: 175
Spamassasin had very, very few false positives as well. I would say less than 1 in 100, but it would pass through about 30% of the spam messages a day. Not good. Not good at all.
If you are like me and don’t want the hassle or the headache of hosting your own mail server look at the Gmail solution. You can change the MX record of your server to allow Gmail to collect mail sent to your domain and use your domain server for outgoing mail. Setup was quick and took less than 15 minutes. We were all set and ready to roll in about 30 minutes.
UPDATE 10/31/06: I have lost track of the totals. Thousands of emails across all of our addresses. 70/30 split favoring SPAM still. We have had 5 false positives and 17 SPAM messages passed through. Google Apps has a significantly lower false positive rate and has passed through far fewer actual SPAM messages. No longer perfect, but a monster leap forward from what we had been using. My Treo has had one (1) SPAM message since we changed the server over.
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