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.

Comments

Re:This Just In

[Solandri]

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.