How to Prevent Gmail Spam Filtering

As discussed in last night's post, Google Apps Outlook 2000 How To, we were migrating a client from their existing email hosting to Google Apps Standard. Although Google does a good job with Postini of filtering spam it still was too much for them and they wanted to disable all spam filtering.

Fortunately a blog post, Bypass Gmail's Spam Filter, covers it however it appears there is not a way to disable it for all accounts in the Google Apps Administrative interface.

Google Apps Outlook 2000 How To

We were doing a migration for a client today that was moving from a local hosting company to using Google Apps Standard for email hosting. Most of their workstations were using Outlook 2003 and 2007 however we found one that was running Windows 2000 and Office 2000. Although Google provides some good tutorials for configuring email clients it did not cover our version. it turns out that the Outlook 2002 setup was close enough to get everything configured.

Outlook 2002 Setup for Google Apps
Outlook 2003 Setup for Google Apps
Outlook 2007 Setup for Google Apps

An interesting note is that Google apparently moved from using SSL for outbound to TLS in Outlook 2007. So make sure to read the correct tutorial for your version of Outlook.

Google Filter Issues?

If you run gmail combined or multiple filters in a single filter entry here is a point if it ever appears that the filters 'quit working'.

Background
In case you didn't know it is possible to apply multiple filters with the same action in a single entry. For example lets say you want to flag a group of inbound emails that come from different people. You get some emails from me.com and you.com however the actions you perform on them is identical when they arrive. You could create a filter that states emails from me.com|you.com in the from portion of the filter. The pipe (|) is the delimiter that separates the different from addresses. It is also not necessary to put the entire email if you get emails from the same domain but different email addresses.

Cause
As of the date of this entry the filter will only process combined entries until it reaches a double pipe (||). In my case it was just an accident on my part as I had removed part of the filter at some point and accidentally left the trailing pipe for that domain. For example if you had a filter as follows: me.com|you.com||us.com|them.com all of the me.com and you.com email would be processed correct however when it reached the double pipe it would fail to process the remaining domains.

Solution
Replace the double pipe with a single pipe. In the example above me.com|you.com||us.com|them.com would be changed to me.com|you.com|us.com|them.com

The hope is that someone on the gmail team will stumble across this entry and by the time you read it the problem will no longer exist :D