Everybody has a favorite method for fighting spam, the bane of in boxes planetwide. Tools like MailWasher and SpamAssassin get the job done for some, but I'm partial to another option: Gmail. Google's universally adored mail service does a great job filtering out junk-but not just for Gmail accounts. See, I have a personal domain that I use for my primary e-mail account, and it gets positivelybombarde.d with spam. By using a couple of native Gmail features, however, I rid my inbox of 99.9 percent of it. Here's the process in a nutshell:

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1. Create a new Gmail account. (I already had one, but I wanted a second that was exclusively dedicated to my domain's mail.)

2. Click Gmail's Settings link, and open the Accounts tab.

3. Select Add another e-mail account, and configure Gmail to fetch messages from your domain's servers (and not to leave copies there; otherwise your server will eventually get full and start rejecting messages). At this point, Gmail will automatically scan for spam when it retrieves mail from other servers.

4. You may not want the browser-based Gmail as your primary e-mail destination-preferring to use Outlook on your desktop, say, and your cell phone for on-the-go messaging. If so, open Gmail's Forwarding and POP/II'-1AP tab and enable IMAP, to permit two way communication between Gmail and other mail clients.

5. Follow Gmail's configuration instructions to set up IMAP with Outlook and any other e-mail clients you want to use.

Now, when I receive e-mail via Outlook or my phone, there's no evidence of Gmail's involvement except for the total lack of spam, which gets neatly filtered out along the way (and stored in Gmail's Spam folder, where I can easily review it for false positives).

In other words, Gmail acts as the spam-filtering intermediary between my domain and my PC or phone. And as a bonus, it lets me access my mail on the Web, which is very handy at times.