i have been using gmail for quite a while, and have always hated hotmail. i hate it now more than ever now that it is 'windows live mail'.

however, there has always been something about gmail that bugs me: how on earth do i get rid of all that spam? i mean, doesn't it ever bug you when you have 3 new messages in your inbox, and then 56 bits of spam? and then you have to manually head to the spam folder, and delete them all? i know gmail offer you a lot of space and i know the spam messages get deleted after 30 days, but for me it is a phsychological thing: i simply do not want that spam there!

well, the other day i learned how to auto-delete your spam: in other words, automatically send it to your trash bin. i thought i might share it with my fellow gmail users...

1. firstly, sign in to your gmail account



2. head to your 'settings' tab



3. go to the 'filters' tab



4. click on 'create a new filter'



5. leaving the other fields empty, in the 'has the words' box, type the following without the quotes: 'is:spam'
then, click on 'next step'



6. then, a box will come up asking you if you would like to continue, say 'ok'



7. finally, there will be a screen asking you what you want to with this mail. tick only the 'delete it' box then click 'create filter'.



8. DONE!!!


NOTE: i dont do this, and it is not necessary since all of the stuff in the spam folder is actually spam for me, however if you like you may check your trash bin from time to time to see if something has been deleted which is not spam.

enjoy a spam-free spam folder!

This post has been edited by bthaxor: Feb 5 2008, 08:03 AM

Yeah this is a great feature of gmail. On Hotmail you dont get as much control over the filters as Gmail offer. For example in Hotmail it only allows you to block email addresses and there is no other filter facility. I got spam everyday on hotmail so I stoped using it awhile. I got worse spam on my yahoo account as it was one of my first emails. I dont even use it now. I'm not sure what yahoo offers in terms of spam control.

Lol, I didnt know this thing in GMail, Thanks for this tutorial I knew it. Some spammers are already spamming in my spam folder. At least I have the solution now!

although it`s nice solution i am afraid to do this.. sometimes, gmail puts activation mails in spam folder so if i create this filter, i would have problems with registration on some sites.. still, it`s a good tut..

nice. its a good thing ive found this thread. it would help a lot. thnx!

thats pretty cool, the only problem I could see is that if you get something sent to you it will automatically be deleted, and may never know; so you would have to check your trash alot when your expecting something and hasn't recieved

Well I do not know how this is good since google has really good spam filter and it is always checking for spam in the new comming messages especially if they are not from trusted address. And how good google engine is you may read here its more of the bernoulli analysis but it sounds good.

And furthermore I qwould like to note that any messages in the spam folder are deleted automatically after certain time interval expires and one more important thing is that sometimes you might actually recieve message from some source like reistration mail and so on that will be sent into the trash bean if you enable this or in fact in the spam folder.

I leave it as it should SPAM mail should be sent in the spam folder I neveer read it and I never delete it there are some 400 messages and they are deleted automatically. So you see what is the point. Imagine that I would have to delete all those messages by myself.

That's clever! I didn't know filters could be this useful. Thanks for sharing.

that is true, I've very rarely had to read anything in Spam and mark as "not spam" it does make life alot easier, and I think that is pretty darn cool!