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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."

17 of 73 comments (clear)

  1. Ask Google by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Not Ask Slashdot.

    1. Re:Ask Google by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      our spam filter is second to none.

      trust us.

      -google

  2. You'll never really know by orthogonal · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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).

    --
    Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
    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. 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.

  3. 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.

    1. Re:buddy Report by MindStalker · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

  4. You are not using a finished service by GrandCow · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    "Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
  5. 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.
  6. Group heuristics vs. Individual heuristics by foniksonik · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    --
    A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
  7. Perhaps the problem is... by Fished · · Score: 2, Funny
    Perhaps the problem is what Gmail has seen of your tastes.

    That's sick dude.

    --
    "He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
  8. 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...?

    1. 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
    2. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. 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.