Gmail SPAM: Update
SPAM email. Everyone hates it. Company and individuals alike have built various systems for dealing with it, but from what I hear, most solutions are sub-optimal.
I currently receive about 365 spam emails per day. 290 in my personal account, and 75 in my work account.
But I hardly ever have to think about this!
That’s because I use hosted Gmail for both my personal and work accounts. Every time a spam email makes it through. I simply check it, and hit the “Report Spam” button. Hundreds of thousands of others do this every day. Then, the Google algorithm goes through and figures out which emails are spam based on this aggregate result.
It ends up being extremely accurate. I’ve only had 2 or 3 false positives* over the past 3 years I’ve used Gmail.
Because of this, I can confidently ignore the spam/junk folder. Gmail saves these messages for 30 days — just in case.
Yet another reason to use hosted Google services… 
*A false positive is a legitimate email that gets marked as spam.
April 30th, 2008 at 11:18 am
The Gmail spam filter is very good, the only complaint I’d have is that is isn’t as customizable as I’d like.
For some reason, I get a lot of Russian spam. With my own spam filter, it’s easy to get rid of those: Russian character set=spam, and that’s it. Gmail wouldn’t want that rule universally, since a lot of people get legitimate e-mail in Russian, but even after manually marking well over 100 pieces of Russian e-mail as spam, Gmail doesn’t seem to be able to create a Russian characters=spam rule just for my account.
And, unfortunately, it’s not something you can filter manually in Gmail (you can’t filter on headers other than from, to, and subject). If they changed that, it would be great.
April 30th, 2008 at 11:43 am
That’s interesting Gary. I’d say about 99% of the spam I receive is in English, but come to think of it, the ones that make it through are often in other languages. This is something they could obviously improve upon.