Gmail and false spam positives
Friday, February 25th 2005
I use "the google email service":http://gmail.com every day. It's brilliant. Like others have claimed before me, it really takes web programming to a new level.
With spam traffic "amounting to an enormous percentage of the total email traffic":http://www.spamhaus.org/news.lasso?article=156, no mail solution is complete without a spam buster, of course. And gmail's solution is neat and accurate.
It _was 'till now_, that is: I have just now rescued three false spam positives from the spam bin. Which boggers me, because the spam count in that bin is *2407* as we speak, and I'm sure i receive a couple of hundred spam a day. In this apolyptic tide of worthless messages, I can easily see a legitimate message drown and float out of my attention. So double-checking the spam bin now and then is not really worth it.
And I'm further bothered by the fact that two of the messages were written in Norwegian. Normally, that fact alone should make it pretty probable that the message is not spam - indeed, I have received Norwegian spam two times, and none to the gmail account. So why did the gmail filter trigger on the Norwegian messages?
And this means *spammers have ruined email*. I'm not sure that's what they set out to do, but the end result of the arms race and ruthless methology by spammers is that I don't trust gmail any more. Thus email in itself starts to loose its value.
Oh, and I've got 50 gmail invites. But I have trouble recommending something I've lost faith in.. So what's the big deal.