Gmail + Thunderbird = spamfree email?

November 17, 2011 1:59 PM

Gmail + Thunderbird = spamfree email? I use gmail (via google apps) for my small company's email. While it is generally good, the inability to permanently block a sender (e.g. businesses who won't remove me from their spam list) is frustrating, especially when the senders keep appearing in the daily quarantine report. Could this be solved by using Thunderbird as an IMAP client (and “whitelisting” the senders in Postini so they don't appear in the quarantine report)? Is there an easier or more elegant solution? TIA.
posted by quidividi to computers & internet (12 answers total)

Can you just set up a server-side filter in Gmail and send any e-mail matching a sender/subject/etc straight to trash? Same with quarantine e-mails containing those senders, I guess, though I have never seen an example of one of those. When are e-mails sent to quarantine? Before or after Google filtering?
posted by supercres at 2:06 PM on November 17, 2011

Server side filter should work.
posted by backwards guitar at 2:22 PM on November 17, 2011

Yep...gmail filter. You can even set it to delete the email immediately.
posted by nosila at 2:25 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

Sign into login.postini.com and add the address (or the entire domain) to your blacklist. If you whitelist them you are saying that you want email from that address.
posted by ridogi at 2:43 PM on November 17, 2011

Thanks for the input, everyone.

I've blacklisted senders using Postini, which filters incoming mail before gmail. That results in blacklisted emails appearing in my quarantine list, where I have to delete them manually. Because Postini is the first filter, even if I create a server-side (ie gmail) filter, many of these emails continue to appear in my quarantine list.

All I want to do is create a rule that says: "delete all email from XXX.com." But it seems that Google is not set up to do this.
posted by quidividi at 4:36 AM on November 18, 2011

Can you create a rule in Thunderbird to clear out your quarantine automatically? What if you don't use postini and just filter with Gmail?
posted by backwards guitar at 5:17 AM on November 18, 2011

@backwards guitar

AFAIK, you can't create a T-Bird filter to clear out the quarantine file automatically. But if I whitelist the domains that I don't want to receive email from, those emails will not get caught by the quarantine. Then I can have those domains deleted by T-Bird.

Not using Postini would mean losing basic spam filtering, making the cure worse than the disease.
posted by quidividi at 6:19 AM on November 18, 2011

If it is blacklisted you should never see the mail in your quarantine. Maybe you have both whitelisted and blacklisted it and you need to remove it from the whitelist.
posted by ridogi at 7:05 AM on November 18, 2011

@ ridogi

Unfortunately, Postini sends all blacklisted emails to quarantine.
posted by quidividi at 2:49 PM on November 18, 2011

Here, too.
posted by quidividi at 2:54 PM on November 18, 2011

You're right. Whitelisting it and then killing it with a server side filter (gmail rule) is the best option then. You can also report it as spam to postini by forwarding a sample message to them.
posted by ridogi at 6:02 PM on November 18, 2011

Thanks for your comments, ridogi.

I have implemented the combination postini whitelist and gmail filter. It works, but you still see the blocked senders in your trash.

If anyone has a more elegant solution, I'd love to hear about it.
posted by quidividi at 10:37 PM on November 24, 2011