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

Old people

[Anonymous Coward]

It's mostly old people. They see something "in writing" and they think it's true. That's why they get bombarded by the "FWD: FWD: FWD: FWD: FWD: FWD: ..." crap and forward it to other old people. And when someone sends them some "offer" via spam, they think it's true. And many think that the government regulates the internet. And those are the folks who have all their marbles. There are quite a few elderly people who just don't have their brains working right.

When I was working a consumer hotline a couple of years ago, the folks complaining about being ripped off by spam were always old people. They were also the ones got ripped off the most by those infomercial products that clean colons and lose fat with just a pill.