I don't know about you but we used to have a spam problem. Until about 18 months ago, I was receiving about 30,000 spam emails a month. Six months before that it was only (only!!!) 20,000 and I knew I had a serious problem. I also knew that this was a problem that was growing all of it's own accord.

One of the biggest problems with getting so much spam mail is that legitimate mail

can get caught in the spam filters and never ever see the light of day. It was happening to us and so periodically I would spend half a day and look through it all prior to deleting it. What a giant inconvenience it was.

Now, just so you don't start to think that we had earned or deserved this problem, let me explain. We purchased a small company that made websites and with it came the spam problem. We took over the domain and realised very quickly that we had a big problem. Our ISP had spam filtering but even they weren't coping with this quantity and that is when Google came to our rescue.

We decided to route all our incoming mail through a gMail account. No matter what your opinion is of Google (we now have a great opinion of them), we were very pleasantly surprised at the outcome. Not only did the amount of spam that reached our inboxes greatly reduce, Google stored and conveniently disposed of the spam after allowing us 30 days grace in which to check through it. Another of the most pleasant surprises we had over time was that Google improved thier filtering process which means that today it is very rare that spam mail reaches me or that legitimate mail gets caught in the filter.

We expected that over time the spam being sent to us would continue to grow and as expected it did. However, we put another strategy in place to remedy this. Instead of accepting any mail sent to our domain, we now only accepted mail that was addressed specifically to one of our addresses. These days we get about 5,000 spam per month, rarely ever check it for missed emails and we are very satisfied with the result. If you have a problem with spam like we did, we strongly recommend using Google to help solve the problem like we did.