How Good is Gmail's Spam Filter? 73
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."
Ask Google (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ask Google (Score:5, Funny)
trust us.
-google
You'll never really know (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Re:You'll never really know (Score:3, Informative)
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)
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...?
Re:I know, and it's HORRIBLE (Score:2, Informative)
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)
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.
Re:I know, and it's HORRIBLE (Score:1)
Re:I know, and it's HORRIBLE (Score:2)
I never thought of doing this, but I DID notice the Spam label on all its false positi
Re:I know, and it's HORRIBLE (Score:2)
Re:I know, and it's HORRIBLE (Score:2)
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.
Re:I know, and it's HORRIBLE (Score:1)
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.
Re:I know, and it's HORRIBLE (Score:2)
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.
Re:I know, and it's HORRIBLE (Score:1)
"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.
Re:I know, and it's HORRIBLE (Score:2)
Re:I know, and it's HORRIBLE (Score:1)
Re:You'll never really know (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:You'll never really know (Score:2)
buddy Report (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a hotmail account for spam and it goes through just fine thank you.
Re:buddy Report (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:buddy Report (Score:2)
Who told you about slasdot?
Re:buddy Report (Score:1)
Re:buddy Report (Score:2)
You are not using a finished service (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:You are not using a finished service (Score:1)
How much personal info on signup? (Score:1, Funny)
Re:How much personal info on search? (Score:1)
It's terrible (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
Re:It's terrible (Score:2)
Re:It's terrible (Score:2)
It makes sense that email it is not 100% sure is spam, may possibly slip through due to that.
Re:I don't know. (Score:2)
Re:I don't know. (Score:1)
Re:I don't know. (Score:1)
Group heuristics vs. Individual heuristics (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
That's sick dude.
About 80% (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:About 80% (Score:2)
Not Good (Score:2)
Really really bad (Score:1, Informative)
What a disapointment !!!!!
Spam filter got all my mails! (Score:1, Informative)
Wow, Such A Range (Score:2)
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
66% falso positives (Score:2)
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
Re:their filtering sucks (Score:2)
The problem is, the group heuristics they use allow for a lot of people to build the filter on what is/isn't spam, which is great, until you start getting jerks who mark tons of legit email as spam, and you start to break the filters usefullness.
Google needs, all email services need, a 2 or 3 pronged aproach... For the length of the beta, use the group heursitics filter... When i
My experience (Score:2)
Fuck you Comcast stop selling email addresses
Re:My experience (Score:2)
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...
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Dum de dum.
I don't know... (Score:2)
Now, about that invite...
It's google (Score:2)
Gmail's spam filter depends on the user input (Score:2)
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.
Re:Gmail's spam filter depends on the user input (Score:2)
I hope it's good... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I hope it's good... (Score:2)
Cheers
Re:I hope it's good... (Score:1)
Re:I hope it's good... (Score:2)
does a slightly better job
I'd test it, if I had an invite =) (Score:1)
mark (at) signal42 (dot) com
TIA.
Not Too Good (Score:2)
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.
My personal experience (Score:2)
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