Questions about using gmail to filter e-mail

[harveyc]

My primary e-mail address is VERY important to me and I've been hit hard for the past few days with a large amount (over 100) of spam messages getting by filters, etc. I saw Allen's post (#4 here) that prompted me to give it a try, though I think this is a slight variation since I want customers to continue seeing "me@mydomain.com" in the addresses sent to them by me. I also want to continue using Outlook to receive/send all of my e-mails for a wide variety of reasons. I'd like any feedback on any problems someone might see in this method. Thanks again, Allen, for your help.

In cpanel I set up a forwarder for "me@mydomain.com" to my gmail account and enabled POP3 in gmail. I set up an Outlook E-Mail Account for this gmail account and used "me@mydomain.com" in the "E-Mail Address" box and set up pop.gmail.com for my outgoing server but left my isp for my outgoing server (something my isp requires). I didn't follow the gmail instructions exactly because of this variation as I only put on the encrypted setting for the outgoing mail in the Advanced tab when setting up this account. Back in cpanel, I then deleted my primary e-mail address (which, is not my default address, though I don't know if that would have made a difference).

All seems to be working well at this point, though e-mail delivery does seem to be a bit slower when I've run some tests (I can see e-mails in my gmail account well before my Outlook). Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

[ofoc]

Gmail does a nice job of filtering spam, but I noticed some delayed-mail issues on forwarded mail. I used the same send-on-behalf-of technique for my me@mydomain address. Doing it like that, I think there's some extra validation slowing things down.

Even better, sign up for "google apps for your domain." You get gmail service with your own domain. I've been using it for a month. So far it's great.

[harveyc]

Thanks for the reply. I signed up for "goolge for apps" but couldn't figure it out. I need to spend some more time reading it, I guess. Maybe when I'm not own some pain medication!

[ofoc]

There are a few steps to take. You have to "verify domain ownership," change your mx records, . . .

They have some good help files. I'd start here: https://www.google.com/support/a/

Let me know if you get stuck on anything in particular.