How Good is Gmail's Spam Filter?

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."

Comments

You'll never really know

[orthogonal]

How Good is Gmail's Spam Filter?

Who knows?

Will it get better? Will it get worse?

Who knows?

Part of the convenience of using GMail -- or any other email service -- is that that service filters spam for you.

But that means you don't get to do your own filtering.

Which is why I don't rely on my ISP to filer, and indeed, asked them explicitly to not filter my mail when they began to do so.

I'm too paranoid about false positives causing me to miss an important email (eventually all those girls who dumped me will wise up and beg my forgiveness, right? Right?), and I figure I can do a better filtering job on the client side. And indeed, I can even use a chain of multiple filters, or roll my own filter.

Currently I'm using SpamBayes, and it works well enough. Could it be better? Sure, it does miss several spams a day. But, it also filters many more than it misses, I'm not worried about false positives, and I can always hack the source if I need to (already did so to work around some MS Outlook stupidity, in fact).

You are not using a finished service

[GrandCow]

Gmail is still in it's beta form. The company is still working out all the kinks in it. That's why you have to go through the process of getting invited before you can set up an account. Spam is going to fall through the cracks for a while until they finish fine-tuning the filter.

As long as it still says beta at the top of the screen when you log in, you should expect things like that. Click report spam and do your part to help the filter get finished.

Re:buddy Report

[MindStalker]

Problem is, most people experience a significant drop in spam when they switch ISPs, atleast when that ISP isn't selling your account.

Group heuristics vs. Individual heuristics

[foniksonik]

Would you rather have an ISP do group heuristics, potentially marking email you want as spam, or individual heuristics, forcing you to identify email spam yourself?

It's a trade-off... on the one hand you get much quicker and more compehensive spam detection by using a group level rule but then you have to check your spam folder to see if it incorrectly marked good email as spam and on the other hand you have individual rules which must be generated for each account based on individual opinions.

Neither is perfect.

Bottom line is that you're using a free service, if you don't like it you can move on w/o expense incurred.