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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."

4 of 73 comments (clear)

  1. buddy Report by Deliveranc3 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Friend who sent me an invite reported a 100% drop in spam from 50 a day to 0.
    I have a hotmail account for spam and it goes through just fine thank you.

  2. It's terrible by Richard5mith · · Score: 2, Interesting

    In a word, it's terrible.

    I forward all my email from my existing account (which I've been using for 5 years and gets a ton of spam) to my gmail account and spam always slips through. I've been using gmail since shortly after it was announced and I have seen it improve, but I'm still getting the same format spam slip through every day.

    I pick up the same mail in Mac OS X Mail, and the combination of POPfile and the Mail spam filter gets it all.

    1. Re:It's terrible by kinema · · Score: 3, Interesting
      I forward all my email from my existing account (which I've been using for 5 years and gets a ton of spam) to my gmail account and spam always slips through.
      Maybe Gmail's filters are factoring in the fact that the mail is being forwarded from an address that it knows you recieve lots of valid email from. I'm sure that the filters use the origin as part of the decision on wether or not a particular message is spam or not.
  3. I know, and it's HORRIBLE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Well, actually - it's HORRIBLE.

    So far, no spam whatsoever has found its way into my inbox. However, the amount of false positives filtered into the spam folder is overwhelming.

    For a while I wondered why I only got reports by email about 30-40% of my finished online auctions (link omitted, no free advertising here). Last week I accidentaly clicked on the spam folder, and there it was, dozens of FALSE POSITIVES.

    And yeah, there is NO INDICATION AT ALL of mail in the spam folder, one have to explicitly look in it to see if there are any e-mails there...

    Sure, mod me troll if you like. I've been using gmail since the first blogger.com-invitations, and am very happy with it (and have more invites to give out than people to give them to. I tried gmailswap for a while but soon got bored).

    Still, far to many false positives. I have no idea why some auction-results were treated as spam, and others not. They're almost identical. Or perhaps it was exactly that which caused the problem, several near identical mails in a short period of time...?