Google Mail, Outlook Web Access, Spam Filtering

Outlook Web Access has a very bad spam filter. Google Mail on the other hand has a brilliant spam filter.

Now, Gmail added a POP3 checking feature some time back, and I would have been more than happy to use it, but POP3 is not enabled on our Exchange server. So what to do? No IMAP either, only OWA is available.

I went out googling for an answer, and there are hundreds of dysfunctional proxies to POP-enable an OWA-enabled Exchange server. I could not find a single proxy which is functional. So I decided to take the proxy which is available from here (originally designed to be used on an iPhone) and made some corrections to the code.

The corrections I made included locking the proxy to only work with a particular Exchange server (don’t want to leave a proxy open for the world to use…) and fixing some bugs in the code. Then, I uploaded the tool to one of my VPSes and ran it in the background. After adding the account via POP3 in Google Mail, it works pretty fine and filters almost a all of my spam.

Only one thing to worry about now: the locking of the mail box when it gets too full, but that’s not a major issue.

While at it, I decided to write a notification tool which will notify me via SMS when there is new mail in my Gmail that has a certain label applied. SMS alerts are now very easy to arrange, just create an appropriate filter and I’m done.

If you are interested in the actual code, you are more than welcome to email me at gratemyl@gmail.com. I may also be able to provide some kind of hosting, but the SMS cost money per message and are cut off at 160 for now (a limit which is easily adjusted).

Tags: email, emails, exchange, filter, gmail, google, google mail, mail, mails, microsoft, microsoft exchange, microsoft outlook, outlook, outlook web access, owa, spam, spam email, spam emails, spam filter, spam filtering, spam mail, spam mail filter, spam mail filtering, spam mails, web access