Using gmail as a spam filter

I dunno how many folks will have the option of doing this so think of it more of a tail of one man's fight against the demonic evils of email of spam rather than a tech tip or anything like that.

It all started when I bought tickets from ticketmaster some months ago. Unknown to me at the time of purchase that ticketmaster were quite happy to sell your details on with no way to opt out of this. So needless to say the address and god knows what else is in the hands of spammers now.

Anyway... getting back to the point. Using gmail as a spam filter. Well this is not rocket science if you have an email account that is getting spammed and you can place a redirect on that account redirect it to a gmail account. The gmail account is free and as far as I can tell their spam filtering seems pretty good.

Now as I said, not all email accounts are capable of redirecting email (not the same as forwarding) but if they are this is a nice free way of adding spam filtering.

Note: - a redirected email will not look like it was sent (in terms of the email addresses shown in the email) by the email account getting spammed. A forwarded email will look like it was sent to the gmail account by your other account.