Gmail goes IMAP
I spend at least an hour a day cleaning spam w/ MailWasher Pro. It goes without saying that a real estate agent or company with a good online presence gets spammed as ruthlessly as anyone, no matter what you do. My spammy wife requires Thunderbird, needs her ‘from’ address to not say “gmail”, and she needs IMAP so her home, cell, office mail are all synched real-time.
I tried using gmail for forwarding: info@domain.com > username@gmail.com > shelley@domain.com(IMAP). But when a legit mail went into the gmail spam folder, “Not Spamming” it of course didn’t synch it w/ shelley@domain.com, and I had to manually forward it from username@gmail.com which gets messy & confusing to all. So using MailWasher was more efficient.
However, once I set the gmail IMAP account up in Tbird, I copied a year’s worth of incoming & outgoing mail from her domain.com IMAP account on to gmail folders (labels appear as folders) and she’s off to the races w/o noticing a change(very important!). Incidentally, I set her’s up to have her mail account forward only (no mailbox) to her gmail account, then in Tbird, I set her email address to shelley@domain.com so it looks like it’s coming from there.
Now I can monitor her spam from a browser,Tbird or cell phone, “Not Spam” it, and it pops back into her Tbird Inbox real-time. Conversely, I can “Report Spam” from the same devices to keep her Inbox clean like I did w/ MailWasher, but Google does most of the work now and I hopefully gain another hour a day for more productive endeavours. I’ve been using Gmail almost since its launch, and there is no easier, cheaper spam mail filter out there for my needs. It’s still technically in BETA, but in my experience, they filter email spam as well as they filter SE spam–not perfect by any means, but better than anybody else.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ22euWXYog
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=75725