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How Good is Gmail's Spam Filter?

Posted by Cliff on from the how-large-are-those-cracks? dept.

juglugs asks: "I've been using Gmail since the first round of invites on Blogger. Tonight I received my very first spam email. It was one of the ones offering me some product (I didn't read it too much) that would increase my manhood. It didn't trouble me too much as I just had to hit the 'Report Spam' button and off it went. But how good is their spam filter? Does anyone else get much spam? Why didn't this get recognized as spam - it had all the usual 'keywords' that you'd normally associate with it."

8 of 73 comments (clear)

  1. Re:You'll never really know by 00420 · · Score: 2, Informative

    GMail allows you to implement your own filters, and if you're really worried about false positives you can always browse your junk folder.

    Although, since it sounds like you're all situated anyways, switching to gmail probably wouldn't be a good idea in your situation.

    --
    Have you tried Linux yet?
  2. About 80% by driptray · · Score: 4, Informative

    I get over 800 spam a day to my domain, which I now have forwarded to my gmail account.

    The gmail spam filter is knocking out about 80% of it. I haven't bothered to check for false positives as it's enough of a hassle getting rid of the approximately 160 spams that get through to my inbox.

  3. Re:I know, and it's HORRIBLE by Gangis · · Score: 2, Informative

    Holy crap! You're right!

    After reading your post, I decided to look into the Spam folder of my gmail account, and there they were: the 2 emails I've been waiting for for a few days. Now I can finally set up my IPv6 tunnel...

    --
    "Black holes are where God divided by zero." - Steve Wright
  4. Re:I know, and it's HORRIBLE by driptray · · Score: 4, Informative

    And yeah, there is NO INDICATION AT ALL of mail in the spam folder

    Create a label called "spam". Anything that gmail filters into the Spam folder will also automatically appear under the "spam" label, which also shows the number of unread messages.

    I don't know why this works, but it does.

  5. Really really bad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    After reading this thread I look at my spam folder in my gmail account. Argh !! What a surprise 6 conversations from different developer mailing list where marked as SPAM. In this particular case their filter did a really poor job : 100% of the mail was valid and should not have been considered as spam.
    What a disapointment !!!!!

  6. Spam filter got all my mails! by Sediyama · · Score: 1, Informative

    I received about 100 e-mails in my gmail account, and almost all mails were marked as spam. And I didn`t received a single spam in this account yet.

  7. Re:You'll never really know by Romeozulu · · Score: 2, Informative

    I have had a GMail account for a couple of weeks, and the Spam filter is not up to the level of SpamAssassin running on my server.

    I get around 2000 Spams a day (due to many of my email addresses being on websites), and using SpamAssassin, I get 1 or 2 Spams a week in my INBOX and an equal number of False-Positives.

    I forwarded all my email to my GMail account to see how it would do. I can't really tell if it's getting any better from the first day. I get 10 or 20 Spams a day that are not caught by GMail. This number does not seem to be going down.

    When I first installed and trained SpamAssassin, it only took a few days before it was catching just about everything, and a few weeks of training got it to the current level.

  8. I hope it's good... by eeg3 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Google's spam filtering better be good. Do a search on google with site:google.com inurl:gmail +"a-". Guess what you get? That's right, a huge list of gmail invites for easy spam harvesting. Way to go google.