Yay, me. I finally got around to fixing it so I can get the messages from my Charter account without getting piles of crappy spam. I’ve had the Charter address for eight years, and although I’d never give it out on any web site or to anyone I don’t know all that well, the combination of clueless people forwarding messages to god-knows-who without stripping addresses, clueless people emailing every Yahoo! and Hotmail address in their goddamned address books by using “To” for the whole works instead of “To” themselves and “Bcc” for everyone else, those idiots with a very similar address giving mine out to their equally idiotic friends and using it to sign up for what might possibly be every promotion available on the Internet, and the fact that Charter farmed out their spam filtering to whatever company was cheapest means I do get a fair amount of spam. Charter still claims that messages are filtered, but IMHO, if anything with a link and the word “Viagra” gets through in any form–even leetspeak spelling–then…well, your spam filters are not doing their fucking job.

I use my Gmail much more than my Charter, but P. still uses my Charter address because that’s what he’s got for me in his address books at home and at work, and my family uses that address for me, too. I wanted Charter on my phone mostly for P., because he doesn’t have IM at work (I think their sysadmin disabled it), can’t figure out why it’s not working on his phone at the moment, and “the powers that be” don’t allow texting on employee accounts. That leaves him to email me for anything that’s not time-critical enough for a call. I did finally figure out why the Charter account wasn’t working on my phone, but it wasn’t more than a day after I did that I turned it off…couldn’t stand the spam. I have sounds enabled, and data pushes to my phone every 15 minutes if I’m home or not far away, and every hour or half hour if I’m away (depending on how long I need the battery to last). My phone is never far from me, and when I hear the new mail sound (and the vibration, if it’s on silent), I usually pick it right up, or at least within a few minutes. I don’t need want to hear the new mail sound every time data gets pushed, then pick up the phone to see it’s only an offer to check my credit score or enlarge a body part that I don’t even have. There is no spam filter for the iPhone (why, I don’t know), and Charter just declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, so I’m pretty sure that customer service is even lower than usual on their list of priorities (not that it was ever high, mind you, but their “Don’t worry–everything will be fine. We’re bankrupt, but not going out of business and we still care about our customers!” advertising is pretty funny), so calling to complain about their crappy filtering would just be a waste of time and an exercise in frustration as I attempted to force The Gauntlet (my name for their automated menu system, since getting through it is like “running the gauntlet”) to give me an actual, live human…who would then note my complaint and…nothing. Enter Gmail.

Whatever people have to say about it, I like Google. They’re a business, and they’re in business to make money, but they manage to do it in such a manner that they don’t annoy me too much with advertising, they aren’t too invasive and offer options to turn off stuff like web history in email, and they provide useful services for free. I think I’ve had Gmail since you still needed an invitation, and I like it. I’m not in love with the web interface because if I’m on my laptop, I always manage to hit some weird key combination (touch-typing on a smaller keyboard) that sends the cursor where I didn’t want it to go, but I can use it with Thunderbird, and I can have it on my phone. Best of all, Gmail has some of the best goddamned spam filters I’ve ever had the pleasure of using. I set up Gmail on my phone the day I got it, and have never had one bit of spam in my Inbox. Today, I used Gmail to keep Charter spam off my iPhone. I don’t care about Thunderbird because I’ve trained the filters so well over the years that anything even remotely resembling spam gets automatically marked read and dumped in the Trash (emptied on exit) unless it’s from someone on my whitelist, but I had to use “creative filtering” for the phone. I created a Gmail address with an odd, nonsense name (reducing overall spam because it’s not “guessable” to spammers who blast a domain with dictionary attacks) then went to Charter’s web mail options and told it to forward all of my messages to the Gmail address, but leave copies on the server. The phone is configured to pick up messages from that account instead of Charter’s POP server, and they remain on the server as well. That way, I can get the messages on my phone, after they’ve gone through Google’s powerful spam filters, and then when I get messages with Thunderbird, they’re downloaded (deleting from the server, since Charter’s mailbox space is laughable even by 90s standards), and filtered through my own (draconian) spam rules. Perfect solution. P. can still email and ask me for the text of a reminder note that he forgot on his desk that morning, and I’ll get the message right away, but I won’t be annoyed with spam. Now I ♥ my iPhone all over again. 🙂