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:Works for me - whatever that is worth

[Tx]

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.