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

This Just In

[Anonymous Coward]

Individual that differs more than 6-sigma from the population's mean has trouble with automated tools designed for the average person.

Gmail's spam filter is why email is still useful.

Works for me - whatever that is worth

[sjbe]

Individual that differs more than 6-sigma from the population's mean has trouble with automated tools designed for the average person.

Exactly. I use Gmail and I honestly haven't had a false positive (flagged as spam when it isn't) in over two years. I still get the occasional false negative (spam that isn't flagged) at a frequency of a few per week. It's good enough that I don't even bother to routinely check my spam filter. It also is pretty good on the training - once you've spent a little time telling it what is spam and what isn't for you in my experience it is pretty good after that. Frankly if you have to check your spam filter often it isn't a very good spam filter.

I suspect Linus has rather unusual email requirements. Perhaps Gmail isn't the ideal solution for him. Very few tools are perfect for everyone. I'm a little surprised he's having that much trouble but stranger things have happened.

Re:Works for me - whatever that is worth

[Mr. Slippery]

Seems like people running mailing lists need to take a look at how spam filters work, rather than mail providers changing anything.

No, you're backwards. It's up to spam filter developers to understand how mailing lists work and not falsely flag legitimate traffic. If your filter breaks a mailing list, your filter is broken.

Re:Boolean filters are wrong

[pem]

at some time it is going to be illegal [to throw away spam]

WTF are you smoking, and can I haz some?

No amendment, not even the first, makes it illegal for me to throw away shit that people decide to send to me.

Spam is a valuable resource.

Pigshit is a valuable resource. Spam is spam. The fact that you can look for similarities in it in order to trash more of it doesn't make it a valuable resource.