Are Gmail’s spam filters getting a little overzealous?
At the moment I am noticing a problem with Gmail and some other people are reporting the same issue so I know I am not alone. Simply put, some of my emails are going missing and some others are becoming seriously delayed. Are Gmail’s spam filters becoming a little too over-zealous in their filtering?
I don’t normally go through the spam folders because doing so is a lesson in tedium. It’s email after email in male organ enhancement offers, sexual God power offers, 20% off Adobe products, and much more. So I tend to steer clear of the spam folder and empty it out once a month. But I went in there yesterday and had a look around and found some “false positives” - emails that are not spam. I found things like blog comments, emails from friends, notifications from Twitter and Digg and other assorted bits and pieces.
But there are things that are not there. Someone, a business client, said he sent me Word documents and they never arrived. This got him seriously rattled. Another client sent me lots of weblinks and the email - sent four times - never arrived. He ended up having to send me the links via a Skype chat message.
I Twittered the situation and other people said that they were also experiencing the same situation - documents going missing, emails getting delayed or not arriving. Has Google reconfigured their spam algorithim, screwed it up and not told anyone? If so, they’d better get it fixed fast because I rely on that email to do my work and if my emails start to get eaten by Google, I will have to move email providers sharpish.
At this point, I would say that I am looking forward to an explanation from Google but who am I kidding? This is Google I’m talking about. We have as much chance of an explanation from Google these days as we have of an apology from eBay whenever something goes wrong.
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May 24th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
I usually get about 80-90 spams a day - and do a quick scan once or twice a day of the subject lines and usually empty all of them. Maybe once or twice a week I find a “false positive” and put it back in my inbox. More often than not, I find spams that the filter misses (maybe two or three a week) rather than “real” mail that gets snagged in error.