Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Why Can't Google Block Spam In Gmail?
An anonymous reader writes Every day my gmail account receives 30-50 spam emails. Some of it is UCE, partially due to a couple dingbats with similar names who apparently think my gmail account belongs to them. The remainder looks to be spambot or Nigerian 419 email. I also run my own MX for my own domain, where I also receive a lot of spam. But with a combination of a couple DNSBL in my sendmail config, SpamAssassin, and procmail, almost none of it gets through to my inbox. In both cases there are rare false positives where a legit email ends up in my spam folder, or in the case of my MX, a spam email gets through to my Inbox, but these are rare occurrences. I'd think with all the Oompa Loompas at the Chocolate Factory that they could do a better job rejecting the obvious spam emails. If they did it would make checking for the occasional false positives in my spam folder a teeny bit easier. For anyone who's responsible for shunting Web-scale spam toward the fate it deserves, what factors go into the decision tree that might lead to so much spam getting through?
I had a meeting with the M$ person ...
And shortly thereafter were escorted off the campus? Did your "sage" advice come unsolicited? Perhaps your advice, which was not based on any direct knowledge of how their spam filters work, was not actually that useful to them?
I don't have a lot of problems with Outlook / Hotmail either, slightly more spam than Gmail, but not much. But do rock on with the anti "M$" blather, the "$" just adds so much more gravitas and validity to your arguments.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
OP might just be getting a lot of legitimate list traffic that they signed up for. That isn't spam, you asked for that and need to hit 'unsubscribe'.
For me personally, I don't use gmail regularly, only to get access to Google's services. I'm careful to NOT opt in to anything with the account on the very rare occasions I need it. On the ultra-rare occasion I need to log in to the gmail account it is always filled with spam --- from Google itself. Whenever I add a Google service it automatically opts in by itself to spam me.
Just checking it now, I've got an enormous list under a tab called "promotions" with ads from Google Play. I've got a similar list under "Social" filled with weekly ads from YouTube. And I've got a weekly notice of how other people are using AdSense. Then I've got a bunch of "circle requests" from a bunch of spammy-looking people.
So gmail's spam filter works for me --- if it ends up in gmail, it is spam.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
... and may chance you didn't read my post:
(There was a LOT more to my presentation that just this; this single part presented here to convey the concept).