Gmail Spam Filter Testing

An anonymous reader writes "What can you do with 1000MB of e-mail space on your Gmail account? One guy, by the name of Aaron Pratt ( prattboy@gmail.com ), has decided to test the spam filters of Google's Gmail service by having his Gmail account blasted with every kind of spam imaginable. He is testing to see how well Gmail's spam filters can sort out the spam from legitamate email (yes, he does get personal emails from people). As of May 25th, he was at about 30% of his Gmail account's 1GB capacity. You can track his progress on his website, http://gmail.prattboy.net (Google cache of this site: cache: gmail.prattboy.net). Here is also an article talking about Aaron's efforts from webpronews.com"

Comments

Welcome to slashdot..

[Fullmetal Edward]

And now he'll have every troll and curious person here sending him spam to.

Re:One of the best things Google/GMail could do

[Adhemar]

Is use the GMail data to operate a checksum blacklist. Obviously, if thousands (or millions) of their users are getting the exact same email, it's probably spam.

Have you read a spam message recently?

Most of the spam messages in my inbox/spam folder tend to have strange xqwv words or rather ackward interpunction { in them; These anomalies change from message to message, even if the the rest of the contents is the same. The whole point is to circumvent checksum-based blacklists.

Google has some pretty bright minds aboard, and a potentially a huge lot of email to use as corpus. I strongly believe that Google/GMail is capable of implementing a rather good email filter. But it will be a bit more complex than the solution you suggest.