vietnamese, virtually

2005-11-05

Filtering spam from Vietnam and elsewhere

The working assumption is that every email address known to an individual or corporate correspondent in Vietnam will be spammed. This could be due to maliciousness or plain ignorance.

To reliably get rid of such spam, use Gmail as a filter, by setting your email handling as follows:
  1. Set up the email account with your known email address to forward all your messages to a Gmail account,
  2. Set Gmail to forward messages to another email account, known only to you. Choose a user id which is difficult to guess at,
  3. Access your messages at this final email account, for instance, with a POP3 application such as Outlook Express or Thunderbird. (It is not recommended to POP a Gmail account because it is quite slow.)

Try it, and see spam reduced to almost zero.