In this articke, Google's Gmail is used as a spam filter.
I have a gmail account, but have never used it (I didn't want to change e-mail addresses, again. But I recently decided to give this a shot. I didn't do it exactly as described, so here is what I did:
1. — I configured every e-mail account I had access to so the e-mail was forwarded to my gmail account. Please note, that this wasn't done in my email client as a rule. I could configure the mail account to "forward to" another e-mail address.
2. — In #1, the forwarding ensured that no mail would be delivered to the accounts. I left my e-mail app alone (yes, it still checks those accounts for mail). However, I ought to configure my client to never check for mail at those addresses again.
3. — I set my gmail account up for POP3 access. I have it leaving the mail on Google's servers. That way, I can search it there if I ever have to.
4. — I then configured my mail client to check my gmail mail.
5. — I undid the configuration of my mail client so my mail is no longer checked by SAProxy (an anchient version that only did ok).
So far, it appears to be working great. It already catches much more spam than my anchient GPL version of SAProxy (alas, it isn't free anymore). But, I must say that SAProxy only did ok. I had to block most spam using black lists.
I'm going to let this run for a week or two and update everyone on how successfull it is.
[Update 2007-03-16 07:49:26] This has worked out so well that I'm still doing it. Plus I get the convienence of webmail with none of the hassles of web only mail.