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.

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.

State the Obvious

[freeze128]

Well, Linus doesn't *HAVE* to use gmail. There are other email providers.

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

[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.