Two Gmail Tricks

Personal Productivity

Gmail has its own ideas how to do things. Here are two small tricks that make it easier to use email with a local email client set-up.

Avoid Spam Filtering

Gmail will apply its own spam filters to all messages going through your Gmail account. This is not optional; there is no way to opt-out.

It is also highly annoying, since Gmail’s opinion on what is spam or not may not agree with mine, or with the traffic I (quite legitimately) might get.

There is a work-around, though, and it is so Google.

  1. Go to “Settings” (the gear icon in the top-right of the Web UI), select “All settings”, choose the “Filters and Blocked Addresses” tab.
  2. Create a new filter
  3. Add a filter rule: if a message “Doesn’t have” followed by a random string, which is extremely unlikely to be part of any message, thereby creating a rule that will match always.
  4. Add a filter action: “Never send it to spam”.

So, if a message does not contain the string, it will not be sent to spam. Two negatives give a positive. So clever.

For good measure, as “random string”, I use an MD5 hash of what I think of Gmail.

I did not come up with this; this trick has been discovered and re-discovered on the Web repeatedly.

By the way: the last 30 days spam is in the spam folder, which is not usually visible in the UI: you must click the “More” button below the list of visible folders. Google automatically deletes spam that is more than 30 days old.

Forward vs Retrieve

Google wants you to read your mail in Gmail’s UI (and nowhere else). That doesn’t work for me — not only do I find the Gmail UI horrific, but I also do have multiple email accounts, most of them not Gmail.

In other words, I want to read my (G)mail in my own mail client, thank you very much.

Under “All Settings”, there is a tab “Forwarding and POP/IMAP”, where one can (supposedly) enable retrieval of mail from Gmail via POP or IMAP.

Or maybe not. I do remember an incident, a few years back, where POP access to Gmail had been restricted or even removed? I don’t remember the details, but I was surprised to even see POP still mentioned here. And: it doesn’t seem to work. After enabling it, and configuring my mail client as instructed, and with the correct credentials, access Gmail via POP failed with an invalid credentials error.

There are also, again, reports that Google will (finally?) disable POP on Gmail really soon now.

I did not try IMAP; apparently you need to enable OAuth in your Google Cloud Account. All I want is to read my mail!

Enough whining — there is a relatively cheap and easy way to get your email out of Gmail.

At the top of the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab, there is an option to forward incoming messages to an arbitrary address.

Setting it up is straightforward, although it takes three steps:

  1. Add a new address: Although the button is called “Add a forwarding address”, this will not enable forwarding, it will just notify Google of this new address. Google will send a test email to that address, with a verification link.

  2. Once the address has been verified, you can now select to have your Gmail traffic forwarded. (Make sure to select the radio button, not just the drop down!) It’s also possible to either delete the message from Gmail after forwarding, or to keep a copy, but mark it as read.

  3. Don’t forget to “Save Changes” when done.