Over recent months I have been growing more and more fed up of the amount of junk mail finding its way past my ISP SPAM filter and the built in Junk Mail filter of OSX Mail, and so over the last week I have been investigating alternative solutions. The answer to the problem came when I received an email from Mailplaneapp.com inviting me to take part in the Beta evaluation of a new GMail app for OS X. For a long time I have had a GMail account but not really used it but this email spurred me to take another look at the Google Mail service.

What I quickly discovered was that one of the lesser known features of GMail is its remarkable SPAM filtering capabilities. It seemed that the obvious solution was to try using GMail as an alternative to my ISP mail service and to replace Mail with MailPlane.

New email users who are not reliant on an existing mail address can easily register with GMail ( and receive a googlemail.com email address ), however I did not want to lose my old email address nor have to re-register with mailing lists and other services so the alternative solution of migrating my existing mail address to GMail was a necessity.

There are basically two options here, the first and simplest is to setup your GMail account to download emails from your existing email service. All that is required here is to add your ISP’s mail server address, your username and password to your GMail account ( Select Settings, Accounts and Get Mail from Other Accounts ) and the GMail service will regularly poll for new mail and transfer into GMail ( either leaving the original mail untouched or deleting it once transferred ).

The second more complex solution involves reconfiguring your domains DNS records to send email direct to GMail. This is only an option if you have your own registered domain ( ie you can’t do this if your email address is part of your ISP’s domain name ). In my case this was the preferred option as it cuts out one step through which mail has to pass before arriving in my inbox and removed the dependancy on my ISP’s email servers. This step will vary significantly from one ISP to another, fortunately Google provide some good guides on how what to do and most reasonably competent computer users should have no trouble getting through the relevant hoops.

DNS changes typically take a couple of days to propogate around the net. In those couple of days mail will continue to be delivered to your old ISP servers whilst at the same time some new items will be start to appear on GMail. To ensure that no mail is lost along the way it is wise to setup a mail collection as in the first option. This will ensure that any emails sent to your ISP are copied into GMail. Once the DNS changes are fully replicated and no further mail is appearing on your ISP servers you can safely remove this mail collection safe in the knowledge that all mail is being delivered direct to GMail.

Having gone through these steps a few days ago now I am now in this position and I am amazed at just how effective GMails SPAM filtering is. So far I have yet to receive a single unwanted item of email in my Inbox. This is in contrast to the situation before where in a typical day I would guess around 20-30 emails found their way through the SPAM defences into my Inbox.

This turnaround is in no small part due to my new Mail client of choice MailPlane ( which I have hardly mentioned so far ! ). I will publish a follow on article to this one to explain in more detail the features of MailPlane. In the meantime if you are finding yourself struggling to deal with junk mail and want a very capable solution I would strongly suggest looking into the combination of GMail and MailPlane. At present MailPlane are only sending out 100 invitations to download the app each day so you will need to register and wait a few weeks before you can start using the app. Also there is no published price for when the app is launched which is a shame. However as long as the price is less than about £40 I would guess that it will sell well.