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Google Businesses Spam The Internet

How Good is Gmail's Spam Filter? 73

Posted by Cliff from the how-large-are-those-cracks? dept.
juglugs asks: "I've been using Gmail since the first round of invites on Blogger. Tonight I received my very first spam email. It was one of the ones offering me some product (I didn't read it too much) that would increase my manhood. It didn't trouble me too much as I just had to hit the 'Report Spam' button and off it went. But how good is their spam filter? Does anyone else get much spam? Why didn't this get recognized as spam - it had all the usual 'keywords' that you'd normally associate with it."
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How Good is Gmail's Spam Filter? More

How Good is Gmail's Spam Filter?

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  • Ask Google (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 26, 2004 @06:18AM (#9536043)
    Not Ask Slashdot.

  • You'll never really know (Score:5, Insightful)

    by orthogonal ( 588627 ) on Saturday June 26, 2004 @06:27AM (#9536059) Journal
    How Good is Gmail's Spam Filter?

    Who knows?

    Will it get better? Will it get worse?

    Who knows?

    Part of the convenience of using GMail -- or any other email service -- is that that service filters spam for you.

    But that means you don't get to do your own filtering.

    Which is why I don't rely on my ISP to filer, and indeed, asked them explicitly to not filter my mail when they began to do so.

    I'm too paranoid about false positives causing me to miss an important email (eventually all those girls who dumped me will wise up and beg my forgiveness, right? Right?), and I figure I can do a better filtering job on the client side. And indeed, I can even use a chain of multiple filters, or roll my own filter.

    Currently I'm using SpamBayes, and it works well enough. Could it be better? Sure, it does miss several spams a day. But, it also filters many more than it misses, I'm not worried about false positives, and I can always hack the source if I need to (already did so to work around some MS Outlook stupidity, in fact).
    • GMail allows you to implement your own filters, and if you're really worried about false positives you can always browse your junk folder.

      Although, since it sounds like you're all situated anyways, switching to gmail probably wouldn't be a good idea in your situation.

    • I know, and it's HORRIBLE (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 26, 2004 @08:50AM (#9536440)
      Well, actually - it's HORRIBLE.

      So far, no spam whatsoever has found its way into my inbox. However, the amount of false positives filtered into the spam folder is overwhelming.

      For a while I wondered why I only got reports by email about 30-40% of my finished online auctions (link omitted, no free advertising here). Last week I accidentaly clicked on the spam folder, and there it was, dozens of FALSE POSITIVES.

      And yeah, there is NO INDICATION AT ALL of mail in the spam folder, one have to explicitly look in it to see if there are any e-mails there...

      Sure, mod me troll if you like. I've been using gmail since the first blogger.com-invitations, and am very happy with it (and have more invites to give out than people to give them to. I tried gmailswap for a while but soon got bored).

      Still, far to many false positives. I have no idea why some auction-results were treated as spam, and others not. They're almost identical. Or perhaps it was exactly that which caused the problem, several near identical mails in a short period of time...?
      • Holy crap! You're right!

        After reading your post, I decided to look into the Spam folder of my gmail account, and there they were: the 2 emails I've been waiting for for a few days. Now I can finally set up my IPv6 tunnel...

      • Re:I know, and it's HORRIBLE (Score:5, Informative)

        by driptray ( 187357 ) on Saturday June 26, 2004 @09:46AM (#9536664)

        And yeah, there is NO INDICATION AT ALL of mail in the spam folder

        Create a label called "spam". Anything that gmail filters into the Spam folder will also automatically appear under the "spam" label, which also shows the number of unread messages.

        I don't know why this works, but it does.

        • How did you go about creating this filter? There is no way to setup a filter based on which folder gmail puts it into, yet you have to tell it to match something.
          • I don't think it matters. Match on from: president@whitehouse.gov. Just so long as a label exists with that name, it'll show up in your 'Labels' category. The 'Spam' folder on the left is just a special label (just like Inbox, Starred, etc.). So, if it finds something as spam, it puts it under the 'Spam' label for you, automatically, even though you don't realize you HAVE a spam label. So make one, and bam, it works.

            I never thought of doing this, but I DID notice the Spam label on all its false positi
          • I thought I sent this, but apparently never clicked submit. ignore my other comment, just make a label (see upper right of the inbox window), and call it spam. Doesn't need to be a filter, just to have something to associate spam with. GMail alaready assigns everything the spam label, you just don't have a way to view it yourself. I wonder if it works for the other ones? (Inbox, Starred are both just labels to GMail, I think). I'm going to go play :)

          • I didn't create a filter, I created a label (called spam). Gmail automagically applied this label to the mail it put in the spam folder. No filters are required.

            There's no reason why this should happen, but it does.

            • It happens because "Spam", along with "Inbox" and "Starred", are real labels that Gmail uses internally to organize those folders. It's nice to see that they use a standard way of storing that kind of information.

              Basically all incoming mail gets either the "Inbox" or the "Spam" label, and starred messages have a "Starred" label. Adding them by hand is useful to see the number of messages, and you can also add manual spam filters.

              • Ah, thanks for this info.

                But I have noticed that if I set up a filter to apply the "spam" label to a message, that message still appears in the Inbox and does not appear in the Spam folder, although it does of course appear under the Spam label.

          • "Create a label called "spam". Anything that gmail filters into the Spam folder will also automatically appear under the "spam" label, which also shows the number of unread messages."

            "How did you go about creating this filter? There is no way to setup a filter based on which folder gmail puts it into, yet you have to tell it to match something."

            Labels and filters are different. He said to create a label. You don't need to set up any matching rules for labels.

        • Questions are, will this kluge work once GMail goes beyond beta, or will the underlying problem (i.e. too many false negatives) be fixed?
      • Gmail is still in beta, you have to expect some sort bugs for now.
    • I have had a GMail account for a couple of weeks, and the Spam filter is not up to the level of SpamAssassin running on my server.

      I get around 2000 Spams a day (due to many of my email addresses being on websites), and using SpamAssassin, I get 1 or 2 Spams a week in my INBOX and an equal number of False-Positives.

      I forwarded all my email to my GMail account to see how it would do. I can't really tell if it's getting any better from the first day. I get 10 or 20 Spams a day that are not caught by GMail.

  • buddy Report (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Deliveranc3 ( 629997 ) <deliverance@level4 . o rg> on Saturday June 26, 2004 @06:49AM (#9536111) Journal
    Friend who sent me an invite reported a 100% drop in spam from 50 a day to 0.
    I have a hotmail account for spam and it goes through just fine thank you.

  • You are not using a finished service (Score:4, Insightful)

    by GrandCow ( 229565 ) on Saturday June 26, 2004 @06:53AM (#9536117)
    Gmail is still in it's beta form. The company is still working out all the kinks in it. That's why you have to go through the process of getting invited before you can set up an account. Spam is going to fall through the cracks for a while until they finish fine-tuning the filter.

    As long as it still says beta at the top of the screen when you log in, you should expect things like that. Click report spam and do your part to help the filter get finished.

  • How much personal info on signup? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Perhaps when you signed up you gave something away and the Gmail filter is that smart that it knew to consider penis enlargement emails as legitimate?

  • It's terrible (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Richard5mith ( 209559 ) on Saturday June 26, 2004 @07:15AM (#9536158) Homepage
    In a word, it's terrible.

    I forward all my email from my existing account (which I've been using for 5 years and gets a ton of spam) to my gmail account and spam always slips through. I've been using gmail since shortly after it was announced and I have seen it improve, but I'm still getting the same format spam slip through every day.

    I pick up the same mail in Mac OS X Mail, and the combination of POPfile and the Mail spam filter gets it all.

    • Re:It's terrible (Score:4, Interesting)

      by kinema ( 630983 ) on Saturday June 26, 2004 @07:20AM (#9536164)
      I forward all my email from my existing account (which I've been using for 5 years and gets a ton of spam) to my gmail account and spam always slips through.
      Maybe Gmail's filters are factoring in the fact that the mail is being forwarded from an address that it knows you recieve lots of valid email from. I'm sure that the filters use the origin as part of the decision on wether or not a particular message is spam or not.
      • Are you *really* sure? Because not every program thinks like a human. Chances are the filter doesn't take origin into account, and that the problems occur because features like that haven't been coded into GMail (which is still beta, so it isn't complete and it's a little early to start questioning the performance of its spam filter).
    • maybe some of it slips through because of the sender's email address... if you send 100 emails from one of your old address to gmail, then accept 20 of them as good emails, and the other 80 are spam, google might be more likely to accept some iffy-spam as legit, since it comes from the same email that a lot of your legit email comes from....

      It makes sense that email it is not 100% sure is spam, may possibly slip through due to that.

  • Group heuristics vs. Individual heuristics (Score:4, Insightful)

    by foniksonik ( 573572 ) on Saturday June 26, 2004 @08:08AM (#9536269) Homepage Journal
    Would you rather have an ISP do group heuristics, potentially marking email you want as spam, or individual heuristics, forcing you to identify email spam yourself?

    It's a trade-off... on the one hand you get much quicker and more compehensive spam detection by using a group level rule but then you have to check your spam folder to see if it incorrectly marked good email as spam and on the other hand you have individual rules which must be generated for each account based on individual opinions.

    Neither is perfect.

    Bottom line is that you're using a free service, if you don't like it you can move on w/o expense incurred.

  • Perhaps the problem is... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Fished ( 574624 ) <amphigory@gmail . c om> on Saturday June 26, 2004 @08:23AM (#9536320)
    Perhaps the problem is what Gmail has seen of your tastes.

    That's sick dude.

  • About 80% (Score:5, Informative)

    by driptray ( 187357 ) on Saturday June 26, 2004 @08:54AM (#9536461)

    I get over 800 spam a day to my domain, which I now have forwarded to my gmail account.

    The gmail spam filter is knocking out about 80% of it. I haven't bothered to check for false positives as it's enough of a hassle getting rid of the approximately 160 spams that get through to my inbox.

  • Gmail has only caught about 5 of the 30 spams I've gotten so far. Although I haven't seen any false positives yet.

  • Really really bad (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    After reading this thread I look at my spam folder in my gmail account. Argh !! What a surprise 6 conversations from different developer mailing list where marked as SPAM. In this particular case their filter did a really poor job : 100% of the mail was valid and should not have been considered as spam.
    What a disapointment !!!!!
  • I received about 100 e-mails in my gmail account, and almost all mails were marked as spam. And I didn`t received a single spam in this account yet.
  • I'm surprised at the range of people saying its good to the people saying its terrible. I was going to say its pretty darn excellent. I use a catch-all address for my domain which I forward to wherever. Filtering on X-Forward I use to be able to catch most of the spam. However, some were so badly formatted that the headers weren't processed properly.

    When I switched to using GMail I didn't realize it at first. I was still getting 2-3 spams a day (which is was what I use to get.) Then I realized I neve
  • I signed my gmail account up for some mailing lists. The other day, I had 12 messages marked as spam. 8 of them were legitimate messages. That gives a 66% false positive rate. There have also been a bunch of false negatives (but I don't have numbers for that). So, gmail's spam filters need a lot of work.

    A bunch of stuff is also filtered at the SMTP level. Anything with an executable attachment is dropped before you ever see it.. this is not so good for some of the security mailing lists like full-dis
  • 4 Comcast accounts that I've never told anyone about are forwarded to gmail:
    • ~400 spam detected per day
    • ~3 spam undetected per day
    • 0 false-positives

    Fuck you Comcast stop selling email addresses

    • I had the same experience and reaction when I saw my unused Comcast accounts get spam.

      Then I realized that all my accounts use common words as usernames.

      These days, it's probably safe to assume that any-dictionary-word@any-large-ISP is going to receive spam...

      ...where "any dictionary word" does not mean only the English dictionary, but a lexicon containing the dictionaries of several languages, plus names, proper nouns, slang, and common misspellings.

      ---
      Dum de dum.
  • ...but I'll be sure to look into it for you.

    Now, about that invite...

  • If there's anyone that I think can create some software to intelligently determine if an email is spam or not, my first guess would be google. They seem to have a good track record of being able to sort the mess we call the Internet. Just give them some time. It's still beta after all.
  • Therefore, the amount of active users should affect the precision of the filtering, since it's the users who report the spam. Since Gmail has relatively few users right now, the filtering might be relatively poor in comparison to what it will become. At least that's what my sense of logic tells me now.

    For the record... Currently, I have 0 ham reported as spam, 7 spam reported as spam, and 1 spam reported as ham. Not many know of my Gmail address at all yet.

  • I hope it's good... (Score:3, Informative)

    by eeg3 ( 785382 ) on Sunday June 27, 2004 @01:58AM (#9540960) Homepage
    Google's spam filtering better be good. Do a search on google with site:google.com inurl:gmail +"a-". Guess what you get? That's right, a huge list of gmail invites for easy spam harvesting. Way to go google.
  • I have several e-mail accounts that receive roughly 2,500 messages a day, each. I could forward them to GMail and tell you -- if you'd invite me =)

    mark (at) signal42 (dot) com

    TIA.
  • I will second what Richard5mith said. I also forward a copy of my mail to GMail to test the spam filtering and labeling features.

    What I have found is that the spam filtering is less effective than Outlook Spam Filter [outlook-spam-filter.com], often letting more 30-50% of spam through to my inbox.
  • I forwarded my email frrom my usual forwarder to gmail. I have gotten two false positives from commercial email that I subscribe to, and several spams have slipped into my inbox. All the missed spams are very similar, having a random dollar amount in the subject line, offering to refinance my house, then wrapping up with a few lines of madlib-like text.

    I have to say, some of these madlib-like phrases are quite amusing. "Japanese requester non-proprietary doesn't" anyone?

    I also got a casino offer signed

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