On Gmail’s “Spam Filter”
Q: You know what really grinds my gears?
A: Gmail’s so called Spam Filter. I have been using it forever, I’m one of the losers who paid for an invite, and I don’t regret it, it’s a great service, perfect if it weren’t for it’s spam filter not doing the job.
For the past year I have had POP enabled, so I’ve been getting my Gmail on Mail (the Mac application), and that has been great, but I can’t do it anymore, I will be working on two computers, which is why I decided to go back to the web interface: it would be easier to check the mail on both desktop and laptop. That was a week ago.
That same week, I decided to look for a different job, so I emailed a couple of companies and waited anxiously for a reply. I setup the Gmail notifier on my macs and that was that, or so I thought. After a couple of days, I noticed I had been receiving a very low amount of emals compared to how it usually is, however I didn’t think much of it until I started to notice 90% of the email in my Gmail inbox was spam. I marked it as such, wondered what was going on, but in the end I just moved on.
Today, I realized there was something wrong because a buddy had just emailed me a song and I didn’t get the email, I checked and checked my inbox but there was nothing there, so I decided to take a quick look at the Spam folder. As expected, all the emails I’d marked as spam on my inbox were there, but to my surprise so were tons of emails from my contacts, and two job offers from days ago. What the hell?.
I reported everything as Not Spam and now the emails are in my inbox, but I’m days late to reply to my contacts, and the job offers once I replied told me they hired someone else due to my “lack of interest”. Why thank you Gmail.
For the past year I had never had this problem, not once did I notice a valid email being marked as spam by Gmail, but I did see a couple of spams pass through the filters and into my inbox, that was just a few times over a year though. But now, after I stopped downloading the emails to my Mac and started using the web mail interface, I get screwed.
I know this is not going to be fixed because I wrote this post, but damn, I’m sure I’m not the only one experiencing this. What say you Gmailers? Is the service getting sloppier?.
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Well, I haven’t noticed any valid emails getting stuck in my spam filter… I do get spam emails into my Inbox though (say, 1 or 2 per day). I can’t imagine why this would be happening (although I’m not a tech person!). The only thing I can think of is that perhaps there “spammy” word in the emails?
Erin on June 26th, 2006 7:35 pm
I’ve noticed more spam lately getting through, but nothing has been dumped that is important.
I would worry that your transition was less than perfect, or perhaps you hand a wandering click.
Maybe your friends are major spammers?
luxuryluke on June 26th, 2006 7:41 pm
Not really, the emails that were marked as spam some were replies, so Gmail already had proof i’d emailed them. We’re talking emails from John Batelle and such being marked as spam. Definitely not good.
josue salazar on June 26th, 2006 7:44 pm
I’ve never really had a problem with emails that weren’t marked as spam ending up in the spam folder. But I do think that the Gmail team at Google may be resting on their laurels a bit. I use 5 different Gmail accounts: Personal, Info, Sales, one for signing up for forums and the last one is my throwaway spam account. Now this last account gets a slot of spam, so much that my pam floder in it is regularly at 6000+ emails. What bugs me is that it’s been over a year and Gmail still hasn’t put in a button to “empty folder contents”. Hotmail has one, even Yahoo!, but for the life of me the Gmail team refuses to even add one.
I think that’s one of the problems with Software designing now: Every one wants to design their application to work totally different than what already out, but they totally neglect the fact that certain just do not need fixing. Take the Flock browser. A really, really beautiful peice of work. I love everything about it except the way that they handle bookmarks. I feel totally screwed by their development team in that they give me, the user, the option of reverting back to they way that I normally organize my bookmarks. Features like a “remove all folder content” button or changing the way bookmarks are organized can really make a break a product in my eyes.
Sorry for the really long soapbox Josue
viperteq on June 26th, 2006 9:33 pm
EDIT:
I feel totally screwed by their development team in that they didn’t give me, the user, the option of reverting back to they way that I normally organize my bookmarks.
viperteq on June 26th, 2006 9:36 pm
And that would be why I don’t use gmail for job offers or quotes. You never can tell what’s going to happen. Set up IMAP on both machines or pick one machine to be your main one (POP) and make the other IMAP, that’s what I do.
On the other hand, it may be time to start checking the old spam folder regularly, I do in Hotmail only because I don’t like seeing it sit there with 30+ messages.
Mike Stickel on June 27th, 2006 1:19 pm
That really sucks. I don’t believe any relevant email goes into my spam folder… as far as I know.
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