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Gmail Spam Filter Changes Bite Linus Torvalds
An anonymous reader points out The Register's story that recent changes to the spam filters that Google uses to pare down junk in gmail evidently are a bit overzealous. Linus Torvalds, who famously likes to manage by email, and whose email flow includes a lot of mailing lists, isn't happy with it.
Ironically perhaps, it was only last week that the Gmail team blogged that its spam filter's rate of false positives is down to less than 0.05 per cent.
In his post, Torvalds said his own experience belies that claim, and that around 30 per cent of the mail in his spam box turned out not to be spam.
"It's actually at the point where I'm noticing missing messages in the email conversations I see, because Gmail has been marking emails in the middle of the conversation as spam. Things that people replied to and that contained patches and problem descriptions," Torvalds wrote.
You can tell this is old news given that it was this past weekend the Linus posted an update on Google Plus stating that false positive rates were back down to normal for him.
https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/dJdkRxUCRmK
Gmail's spam filter is why email is still useful.
I might not be six sigmas from the population mean, but the aggressive filtering of Google's mail service is annoying me more and more. I don't use it myself, but quite a few of my recurring professional contacts do, often behind their own domains so there's no way to know until it breaks. Aside from the privacy implications of that, I'm getting awfully bored of finishing a day's work, e-mailing the results to wherever they need to go, and getting in the next morning to find a nasty note from Google that was sent back after I'd left saying my mail had been blocked because they considered something in the attached file a security risk. This is particularly infuriating if I'm working in the UK and sending the results to a contact on US time, because it costs between half a day and an entire day to catch up.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
He posted about it in G+, a googler noticed and offered to look into it. One day later The Register is feeding off the echoes and the story is slashdotted.
"Much better now.
Of the 100+ messages caught as spam over-night, only two were false positives (and I reported them). My email is getting back to normal."
https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/dJdkRxUCRmK
On the next day, Linus wrote "My email is getting back to normal."
https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/dJdkRxUCRmK
GMail started flagging Youtube newsletters as SPAM but gets confused by another filter I added manually to all e-mails from Youtube. I had created a filter which adds a label to that type of e-mail, and now GMail says "This message was not sent to Spam because of a filter you created." every time I am getting an e-mail from Youtube.
Funny, 'cause Youtube is owned by Google.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Not sure why Linus and you are complaining. Gmail already has a tool for eliminating false positives. You set up a filter to automatically give any email from a particular mailing list a label for that list. It's actually a great tool for auto-organizing your email if you subscribe to multiple lists like he does.
When setting up the filter, you make sure to check the "Never send it to spam" option.