How to cut down on spam in your iPhone mailbox

I'm still playing with it and trying to learn how to use it. One use for me is the ability to get my email from my .Mac account and from others. But the downside is the spam that makes it through, since cell phones don't have much server-side nor any client-side protection. This was alluded to in a recent article in the New York Times by Michelle Slatalla"An iPhone Changed My Life [Briefly]".

I'm hoping David Pogue will cover this issue in his Missing Manual series, although he certainly has a start on a number of tricks at that site.

I use SpamSieve and know what Ms. Slatalla means every time I have to clean out my Eudora junk box. But that's not possible on the iPhone [or on Verizon's Treo for that matter]. What I was going to do with my 'old' Treo & Verizon Wireless account but have done with my iPhone much more simply is use GMail to trap spam. Basically, I forward email from my email account to a GMail account which then is checked as an email account by the iPhone [after setting it up to be checked on the iPhone in the settings area].

Email goes to my usual account and is forwarded to GMail [staying on my regular account server for the typical download and reading in my office] then iPhone checks the GMail account and gets, for the most part, only good messages. I'm sure some spam will slip through but looking at my Gmail account it shows several spam messages that were not in the inbox of GMail and thus, not sent to my iPhone. There may be a more elegant workaround but for now this appears to work. I see that iPhone can also be set up to check other email accounts [e.g., Yahoo etc.] and using those alternatives probably would work likewise.