David Russell

For some time now, I've been on the hunt for a solid anti-spam solution for email. I dig my web host, 1&1, but their spam prevention sucks. I have thought about employing a third-party filtering service, like Postini or Katharion, but both really feel geared toward corporate deployments. In fact, we use Postini for mail filtering at National Community Church and we love it. While it is possible to get set up on services like these with "personal" or single- to few-user accounts, I decided to take the easier (and less expensive) route that is Google Apps.

After some quick research, including sifting through a few documented experiences others had with Google Apps, I started setting up my domain on their system. I won't take advantage of all of their features (most notably Docs), but I will certainly use it for email. Google Mail boasts a really simple and solid spam filter. Many people route their outside email accounts through Gmail just for the spam protection. As a Gmail user, I realize it's not perfect. But it will be far better than what I have in place now, which is really nothing beyond using Mozilla Thunderbird's Bayesian filtering system.

I will continue to use Thunderbird thanks to Google's support of IMAP. But I did have to export the mail on my 1&1 server to get it into Mail on Google Apps. In my initial research, this task looked a bit daunting—not difficult, just tedious. The I stumbled on a solution provided by Google. It's a simple utility designed to take mail stored locally in common mail clients (like Thunderbird) and upload it to Google Mail. Because I leave my folders on the server and interact with them there, I needed to copy the folders locally. Mozilla makes this fairly simple in Thunderbird. Just drag the "Inbox" from the folder on the server down into the "Local Folders" account. I can't be certain, but it almost appears that Thunderbird merely mimics the sync, but allows those dragged-in folders to function like local folders. In the end, I had to make sure that every single folder and sub-folder had been synchronized first. Then I dragged the top-level folder (Inbox, in my case) to Local Folders. This created a local copy that the Google utility could work with. It really didn't feel like any data was actually copied to my computer from the mail server. (It would have been about 1 GB of data, if so.) Perhaps only the headers came, or perhaps Thunderbird simply created a local mirror, or symbolic link of sorts to the files on the server. I don't really have time to investigate the why or how, but I do know that Thunderbird made the process fairly simple for the Google utility. Of course, it would be simplest if the utility could grab the data straight from the direct-to-server folders and sub-folders. But I really can't complain.

Now it will be interesting to see how Google Apps actually performs. I have heard very few complaints and many praises for the service. In fact, I probably would have waded in many months ago, but it's only been in recent weeks that I felt compelled enough to find a solution to my spam problem. Beyond of the top-notch security, I now get the sweet Google Mail web interface along with other fine Google services like Calendar and Chat—all using my own domain!

• Google Apps
• Google Email Uploader
• Mozilla Thunderbird

Tagged: google, apps, mail, email, spam, security, imap, 1&1, webmail, gmail, mozilla, thunderbird