Web Talk

One of the first things we do with Google is, without any doubt, open a Google account and use its excellent Gmail, also known as Google Mail for those people living in the UK or Germany. This e-mail account lets you store an unprecedented quantity of e-mails so that you won’t need to delete any of them any longer. E-mails sent to Gmail can be read through web interface or via free POP3 or IMAP software such as Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook etc. with the certainty that your inbox won’t get clogged by the hundreds of spam e-mails which try to reach you, daily. As a matter of fact, Google has created an efficient spam  filter which detects Spam thanks to a huge blacklist updated by Gmail users themselves (and not only that). But what happen when an e-mail coming from a friend or coworker of yours try to reach you and get caught by the spam filter?

A situation like that is technically called false positive and it means that Google, by mistake, has considered a legitimate e-mail as spam, sending it to the Gmail spam folder. If you use the web based Gmail service it will be pretty easy for you to recover false positive e-mails. In fact,  the only thing you need to do is go to the spam folder, spot the email and mark it as “Not spam”. If you use a free POP3 or IMAP software the story changes entirely. In fact Gmail keeps spam and doesn’t send it to your computer. In this way, you won’t have any way to know if some legitimate e-mails was marked as spam. The only way to prevent all this is to disable the spam filter. Let’s see how we can achieve this thanks to this little trick.

• Sign-in your Gmail and create a filter. On the right of the Search Box you should see a little, really little link saying “Create a filter”. Click it.
• Now you should see a succession of empty text boxes. Spot the one labeled  Has the Word and enter the following text:  is:spam or in:spam or label:spam
• Click Next Step
• Now you should face a window warning you against the procedure you just started. Click OK without any doubt.
• Now tick the checkbox for Never send it to Spam
• Click Create a Filter.
• Done. From now on your Gmail spam filter will be deactivated.