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How To Disable Gmail’s Spam Filter or Spam Box With 2 Easy Steps

February 19, 2010

There are several things that I hate, and one of them is spam. The problem with spam is not actually reading the spam, but having to live with all the workarounds that have now surfaced to reduce the onslaught of spam. For example: anti-spam filters in your mail program. In the past, like 10 years ago, all email would go straight to your inbox. With the advent of spam, spam filters have also surfaced, and now spam, or spam-like messages automatically gets sorted and placed in your spam box. It’s great in theory, but in reality, it doesn’t work perfectly, and in some cases, good mail gets categorised as spam, and you might just miss an important mail because of that.

This is a problem that happens to Gmail as well.

I use Gmail not through its web interface, but as a POP service that I access with Apple Mail. This didn’t pose a problem to me until one day when I realised that I wasn’t getting mail from my friend. He claimed that he had sent the mail, but I never got it in my inbox. After some digging, I found it – the mail was in my Gmail spam box, and because it was spam, it never got downloaded together to my Apple Mail inbox.

So I had to disable Gmail’s spam filter. It seemed like overkill, because the problem only surfaced with maybe 1 mail out of 10,000. However, that could be an important mail, and I wasn’t ready to risk that happening.

Next problem: Gmail doesn’t have a “Disable spam box” or a “Disable anti-spam” function. I was hoping for something in Gmail’s option that I could just check, but apparently that doesn’t exist. So a workaround was needed. This is what you need to do, to disable Gmail’s spam filter.

Step 1: Create a new filter (Under options)

gmail disable spam steps 1

Put in the term is:spam as the terms that you’d like to filter in the “Has the words” box. Now when you click on “Next step”, Google will prompt you with this message, saying that it’s not recommended. Click ok for that message.

gmail disable spam steps 2

Step 2: Check, and Click

The next step’s really easy too. On the next screen, you just have to check the option “Never send it to spam” and then click on “Create the filter”.

gmail disable spam steps 3

What do you know, you’re done! Gmail’s anti-spam filter is now disabled for your account, and if you’re using POP to access Gmail, you should now receive ALL mails.

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