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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.
One of the ways of combating it economically is to make it require more effort to successfully deliver spam to the target recipients. i.e. using a filter.
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.
In my experience it is crap. Not as bad as Linus experience, but it stil mistook on 1 in 200 emails just like google says and that is COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE. Having to find important emails in the thousands of spam emails is a problem, and haven't seen any other spam filter with that many false positives.
I read about this a few days ago on The Register, according to one user there, this particular issue is to do with DKIM and mailing lists (the stuff Linus had issues with was all Linux kernel mailing list messages);
bhtooefr "Basically, Google's enforcing DKIM from certain domains, and if a message is "from" someone whose e-mail host provides proper DKIM, but it's missing it, Google (and Yahoo) servers reject it. Mailing lists aren't usually set up to properly handle DKIM (being, effectively, a relay), and therefore get rejected.
The workaround that I saw one mailing list use was to resend the e-mail from the mailing list's address, append "via (mailing list name)" to the name on the from field, and just have both the mailing list and the original author in reply-to."
Seems like people running mailing lists need to take a look at how spam filters work, rather than mail providers changing anything. If I understand correctly, the policy is sensible and blocks a likely spam vector, and legit mailing lists could easily be set up to not fail that particular check.
For regular mail, I'm like you guys, Google's spam filtering does a fantastic job. I never check my spam folder any more, unless I'm expecting an email and it doesn't arrive, but it's been ages since I had a false positive.
Oh no... it's the future.
I've had this problem with small websites I run. A lot of contact forms default to using the submitter as from still, I have to edit the code that sends the mail in the module to be from the site's domain and use the reply-to.
I started having to do this year's ago, yet very few modules let you take advantage of reply-to still. Very annoying.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
From his original post, there is a clear date he claims the FP rate to have gone up... so this isn't a blanket Gmail FP rate issue, but rather a Gmail or spam blacklist incident, which is quite different from what the summary would suggest. As of right now:
http://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=blacklist%3aLKML.ORG&run=toolpage
lkml.org Added to UCEPROTECTL2
Uceprotectl2 Automatically Delists Entries
This blacklist does not offer any form of manual request to delist. Your IP Address will either automatically expire from listing after a given timeframe, or after time expires from the last receipt of spam into their spamtraps from your IP Address.
Uceprotectl2 Accepts Payments Or Donations
This blacklist does support a manual request to remove, delist, or expedite your IP Address from their database upon Payment or Donation of fees to their organization. Please note the following; 1) MxToolBox does not in any way advocate the paying of removal from any blacklists. 2) Removal requests that are submitted without addressing the core problem will likely result in your IP Address being relisted in the database which can cause subsequent problems and extended listing periods without release.
More information about UCEPROTECTL2 can be found at their website: http://www.uceprotect.net/
Reason for listing - Net 146.185.176.0/21 is UCEPROTECT-Level2 listed because 36 abusers are hosted by RCN-ASN - Reality Check Network Corp./AS46652 there. See: http://www.uceprotect.net/rblc...
UCEPROTECTL2 seems a bit shady, but I am not blacklist expert.
Also as a side note, any spam filter that attempts context evaluation has a tendency to mark emails with code or special character formatting as spam. Even emails with links. So for someone like Linus to have a higher blanket spam FP rate is also not surprising.
The best gmail feature is the "never treat as spam" filter.