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When you sign up with Google Mail, otherwise known as Gmail, a robust spam filtering functionality is included in the package. Gmail's spam filter has received accolades from users who enjoy a virtually spam-free e-mail experience. I've used Gmail exclusively for a couple of years, and I've only received a handful of spam messages.

If you would like to sign up with a Gmail account without the spam filtering feature, Gmail doesn't allow you to turn off spam filtering. You can, however, use another filter to work around the problem. In this article, we'll take a look at how to how you can effectively turn off spam filtering after signing up with a new Gmail account.

Why You May Want to Turn Off Spam Filtering
While Gmail's spam filtering feature is highly effective at screening out obnoxious sales messages, possible viruses, and international "I need to deposit a hundred million dollars into your bank account" scams, the downside is that occasionally a message or two from a legitimate source does in fact get routed to your spam folder. For example, you just signed up with a website and they're asking you to confirm your account.

In my experience this is a rare occurrence; but if you feel it's important to you (especially since e-mails in the spam folder are consecutively deleted every 30 days), you can create a new filter to effectively turn off spam filtering. Here's how to do it within the Gmail interface:

1) In the upper right corner of your screen, click Settings to go to the Settings page.

2) In the top menu, click Filters.

3) At the bottom center of the page, click Create a new filter. The top of the page changes to display several input fields.

4) In the Has the words field, type label:spam.

5) Click the Next Step button. A popup box appears, asking you if you want to go to the next step.

6) Click OK to display a list of checkboxes.

7) Check the Never send it to spam checkbox.

8) Click the Create Filter button. Your filter is now active. All future spam e-mails will be routed to your inbox.

To resolve the problem of legitimate senders' e-mails being routed to your spam folder, you can add senders to your Gmail contact list and Gmail will never forward their messages to your spam folder. However, this can be very time consuming; and future senders' e-mails may still end up in your spam folder. Thus, it's either all or nothing when it comes to dealing with spam in your Gmail inbox: either create the spam re-routing filter to route all spam to your inbox, or simply allow Gmail to continue to filter incoming spam messages.

Learn more about this author, Daniel J. Gansle.
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