phocks

For years we’ve been running an on-site mail server using hMailServer on our Windows 2003 box. Recently we’ve wanted to start investigating an external solution, mainly due to lost emails when the internet is down around the office. After looking at a few other options, I found that Gmail through the Google Apps suite seemed to actually be the best solution.

It’s pretty easy to set up through a domain you have control over. You just need to change the MX records to point to the gmail servers, and create accounts for each user in the admin control panel. The best part for me is the POP3 feature, which allows the whole office to continue using the mail client that they’re used to (Outlook 2007 unfortunately in this case).

We’re planning on rolling this out within the next few weeks. All is set up except the MX redirection and pointing each Outlook to the new POP and SMPT servers. Awaiting the go-ahead, and then looking forward to not having to maintain this on-site server and spam filter, and having an archive of all emails online, accessable from anywhere.

Sweet!

Ever been tempted to check that spam folder just one more time even though you know there’s never (or only on the rarest of occasions) any legitamite mail in there?

Here’s what I did to automatically mark all spam messages as read, thus eliminating the spam count and stopping me from wasting my time looking in that folder over and over again. You can even have gmail look for certain words, such as your name or company, in emails that may be not spam (yummy ham) and bring them to your attention as a false positive.

So what you do anyway is from the Gmail inbox click Create a filter. Now in the Has the words box type in:spam and in the Doesn’t have box type any words that you want to exclude (your name for instance). Click next and disregard the warning message that shows up; they don’t know what they’re on about.

In the next step check the Mark as read box and then Create Filter.

And you’re done. No more spam count. Just make sure you check it every so often in case something slips through.

Now go get some real work done 🙂