Coen Jacobs

Most of the complaints that I’ve heard about Gmail is the lack of functionality to disable (or even to bypass) the spam filter.

For people who fetch their email with Outlook, Thunderbird or whatever application you are using, this can be quite annoying. Every time you want to check if there is a email claimed to be spam, but it actually isn’t (false positives), you need to log in to Gmail and read trough your spam. A real time consumer that you can avoid by using filters in Gmail.

Disable the spam with a simple filter

The filters in Gmail make it such a valuable application. I use them to attach labels to emails depending on their source. All emails that I receive from Twitter, Facebook and other social networks get the label ’social’.

We can use the asterisk ( * ) as a wildcard in filters. With the new option added to the Gmail filters that is called ‘never send it to spam’, we can prevent certain emails from getting into spam. But combined with wildcards, we can prevent all email from getting into spam.

Step 1: Add a new filter with a wildcard

Creating the filter to disable the spam filter, is simple. Let’s start by adding the filter. You do this by clicking on the ‘Create a filter’-link that is to be found right next to the search box and it’s buttons.

Add a filter in Gmail using a wildcard with the asterisk

Now, we create a new filter. We want to use the wildcard to match with all the senders of email, this way the filter will be applied to all email that is being received. Now we click ‘Next step’ to select the options for this filter that will be applied to all email that we receive from now on.

Step 2: Set the options for this filter

The next screen will show us the options that we are able to enable for this filter. The very last one, has been recently added. It’s called ‘Never send it to Spam’. With our filter that matches all email we receive, this option will put all email in the inbox, even when it should be in spam.

Add option to new filter in Gmail to bypass the spam-filter

Now, we have ticked the option to ‘Never send it to Spam’, we can activate the filter by clicking the button ‘Create filter’.

Step 3: See the spam filling your inbox!

With this filter activated, all spam will be shown in the inbox and this will basically come down to the fact that the spam-filter is disabled in your Gmail-account. Now it is up to you to configure your own spam-filter in your Outlook, Thunderbird or any other software you are using.

When you don’t use a external application to fetch your email I do not recommend this filter. If you enjoy spam in your inbox, feel free to add this filter, but I’m sure you will be annoyed by it pretty fast.