Josue Salazar has a problem 
with Gmail’s spam filter.
After switching from Mail.app to the web-interface to read his Gmail, something odd began to happen:
I started to notice 90% of the email in my Gmail inbox was spam. I marked it as such, wondered what was going on, but in the end I just moved on.
Today, I realized there was something wrong…. I decided to take a quick look at the Spam folder. As expected, all the emails I’d marked as spam on my inbox were there, but to my surprise so were tons of emails from my contacts, and two job offers from days ago. What the hell?
Josue emailed asking if I would mention this onslaught of false positives “to see if someone else is having the same issues I am, or if it’s just me seeing things.” I don’t know the answer, not using Gmail as much as I possibly should.
Dr Drang has a suggestion about how Gmail’s spam filtering could be improved. He is fairly happy; Gmail catches 85% of his spam, but he worries about the other 15%, most of it not in English. It could be solved, he suggests, by
the ability to filter based on the character set used in the message. I cannot read anything written Asian or Cyrillic characters and no one I know would send me such a message, so it must be spam. Back in my Linux days, I used the procmail filter given in the Bogofilter FAQ to eliminate Asian spam before my spam filter even saw it…. The Google folks are generally considered the smartest working on the web today; they should be able to whip up a character set filter in no time.
Or you could just use an IMAP provider that has a procmail filter (or (even better?) Sieve).
Phrases like “Back in my Linux days” are really funny to me. They’re supposed to look similar to “Back in the old days” (implying 30 or 40 years ago, maybe) but actually mean “six months ago.”
It’s not like procmail filters are a thing of the past. :)
My experience with the Gmail spam filter is that it is a good one. I get somewhere around fifty pieces of spam a day and I have never had a false positive, although one or two pieces of spam per day generally escape the filter and end up in my inbox.
The only thing that annoys me about Gmail’s spam filter is that it is not adjustable and that there is no way to turn it off.
Jeff, my experience had been great, until now. I’ll just have to pay more attention to what Gmail marks as spam or not from now on.
Spam filters are inherently not perfect. A much better approach is using the philosophy of two email addresses are better than one. By this argument (and assuming you have a software solution that can help manage it) you can have N number of addresses where each one corresponds to a user you have total control of who can and cannot send email. The problem with this approach is its not humanly possible to manage. It can be managed in software.
Reflexion does this and its much better (I am a user) than a spam filter. its language independent and requires no image recognition software either. http://www.reflexion.net.
Ted, who says I wasn’t using Linux 30 years ago? You kids with your Ubuntu and Knoppix—try getting Linux installed on a CDC Cyber 175 after your deck of punched cards has fallen on the floor and gotten out of order!
As I said in my post, I’m generally quite happy with the GMail/Mail.app combo. GMail catches most of the spam, which reduces bandwidth, and Mail catches almost all of the rest. I haven’t had the false positive problem Josue mentioned. I don’t think of procmail as a thing of the past, I just haven’t needed to use it for a while. I do think GMail could be improved if it gave us something procmailish.
Dr. Drang — I was just teasing. :) I grew up with Slackware 2.0, back when setting up PPP over dial-up was pretty advanced and something few people understood why you would want to do. I’ve never used either Ubuntu nor Knoppix. :)
I have LOTS of false positive problems with GMail, and it still fails to do a good job with spam even after lots of training. It frustrates me to no end. I really wish I could just turn it off so that I could do my own filtering and just send the filtered mail to it for archival.
Ted Pavlic Says:
July 2nd, 2006 at 2:04 pm
Dr. Drang — I was just teasing. :)
Me, too. Maybe I should learn how to use those smiley things. (This would be a good place for one, right?)
Here’s a little code to effectively turn off gmail spam filtering in Outlook. This way you can continue to download your email using POP3 and use your favorite spam filtering client.
See: http://mjcenterprises.blogspot.com