Gmail spam false positives

tonyj

I dunno if anyone else has noticed this. But in the past week or so the Gmail spam filter is really going overboard and flagging lots of legit emails as spam.

I just spent the last hours going through 2,500 emails in my spam folder, and found 10 which were legit emails... :mad: :mad: :mad:

I flagged them as 'not spam' - but I don't think this makes much difference to the gmail filters.

Just a warning to any gmail users out there.

Farls

I delete any spam i get everyday. The reason their spam could be that its a mass email and other people have flagged it as spam.

Gmail is still decades ahead of yahoo and hotmail when it comes to spam.

Tiffany

tonyj wrote:

I just spent the last hours going through 2,500 emails in my spam folder, and found 10 which were legit emails... :mad: :mad: :mad:

*theatrical gasp*

Pfft... that's only .4% of the 2,500 spam e-mails that were actually legit. And considering Gmail is not a human being, rather a bot which automatically filters spam, that's pretty impressive.

Anyway, it's not Gmail's fault you get so much spam sent to you in the first place.

tonyj

Tiffany wrote:

Pfft... that's only .4% of the 2,500 spam e-mails that were actually legit. And considering Gmail is not a human being, rather a bot which automatically filters spam, that's pretty impressive.

Zero false positives is an absolute requirement of any anti-spam system. Otherwise what's the point? - Just let all the spam into your in-box, as you'll end up going through it every day anyway....

Don't get me wrong, I love gmail. Just pointing out that it seems to be picking up more than usual. Reading this thread was not compulsory.

Tiffany wrote:

Anyway, it's not Gmail's fault you get so much spam sent to you in the first place.

Yea. Must be all the porn sites I'm signed up to.

Lump

I'd prefere it to be too good. Maybe you should stop signing up to spammy sites/porn/warez/random sites, hence reducing your spam. I get about 1 Spam e-mail to my gmail account every fortnight.

I have a different account that I use for registering with sites.

John

Mossy Monk

spam free for 2 years

i love how some people blame their email provider for spam. not saying OP is

Hobbes

Went and checked an old email account that I had to give up because of spam. It has 73 unread mails. Of that 1 was a person I talk to.

Compare to gmail where false positives are very low. Zero would be great but having no spam is better.

BuffyBot

Zero false positives is an absolute requirement of any anti-spam system

I've yet to meet one that gives that result.

Dizzyblabla

The only spam i get is the winning the lotto/help me with my dead husbands 300million dollars emails, and almost all of them go into the spam box... I do check it though, but that's just force of habit from hotmail...

vector

Mossy Monk wrote:

spam free for 2 years ...

What are you using... a whitelist?

IceHawk

Gotta say I never get spam. I'm signed up on a few webzine publications and stuff but everything I get is legit. Exept those stupid 'hotmail staff' emails. Every time I get one I mark it as spam in the hope that MSN will get the idea I'M NOT INTERESTED in upgrading MSN messenger or paying money for an account 1% of the size of my FREE GMail account. Apparently the hotmail filters can't accept that people would consider this sort of thing spam. Stupid Microsoft.

Maximilian

You people have it easy. As editor of a number of reasonably popular and somewhat popular magazines, including:

* Spam & Tinned Meat Gazette;
* Viagra Digest;
* XXXX Crackwhore Tits & Country Journal;
* Pyramid Scheme DIY Monthly;
* Pre-Aprroved loan Times;

I have terrible trouble getting any emails at all. For some reason, 98% (+/- 2%) of all my genuine emails get filtered and marked as junk. It is doing my head in - I have to wade through dozens and dozens of unwanted emails every day.

Rew

Thank god I read this and had a good look through my spam folder, there are several mails about job offers/CV recipts in there!

Funny thing was it included a PFO for a job with google!

tonyj

tonyj wrote:

I dunno if anyone else has noticed this. But in the past week or so the Gmail spam filter is really going overboard and flagging lots of legit emails as spam.

I just spent the last hours going through 2,500 emails in my spam folder, and found 10 which were legit emails... :mad: :mad: :mad:

I flagged them as 'not spam' - but I don't think this makes much difference to the gmail filters.

Just a warning to any gmail users out there.

Flagging email as spam or not spam helps the system learn what is or is not spam.
The more people do this the more accurate it becomes.

Rew

Problem is I get updates from Dell on their offers and they were all flagged as spam. I can imagine some people sign up for them then mark them as spam. Iv found grey listing on a postfix server has cut spam by 99%. Problem is it can lead to delays in emails coming through.

28064212

Rew wrote:

Problem is I get updates from Dell on their offers and they were all flagged as spam.

So flag them as not spam. I haven't gotten a single spam message in years. They weren't blocked, I just don't get spam at all. Signed up to various different boards and registered to a few sites, but a bit of common sense generally keeps you fairly free. If you're getting 2,500 (sorry, 2,490) spam emails a month, you're doing something wrong. The only other thing is, don't publish your email address anywhere on the web ie on your homepage or whatever. Web crawlers can pick those up easily, sign you up to whatever automatically

Rew

Thanks for that, all of which im well aware of. I have some very public email addresses because the public need to contact me, so spam is unavoidable.

tonyj

28064212 wrote:

The only other thing is, don't publish your email address anywhere on the web ie on your homepage or whatever. Web crawlers can pick those up easily, sign you up to whatever automatically

Thanks for pointing this out. Spammers don't just get email addresses from porn sign-up pages!

Unfortunately my email address has had to be published on a website to let customers contact me. So there's no getting around that. (Okay, there's the workaround of displaying the address as a gif, but I like the 'one-click' thing)

Plus, another source of spam is brute-force dictionary spam attacks. I own a few domains. I direct the main email addresses to my gmail account, but I also direct the 'catch-all' emails to myself, in case someone types an address incorrectly.

And when a spammer starts a brute-force dictionary attack on a domain you can get 5 or 6 of the same spam coming through.

Also, it might start with just one spam email a day or week.... but give it a few years and the volumes increase (as the spam bots realise your address is working it'll appear on more lists) If you have a new email address you might get away with no spam for a while. But try setting up a hotmail account called 'ijn234n9u@hotmail.com' or whatever, and see how long it takes for the first spam to reach you!

Again, I'm very happy with gmail, and spam is a fact of life which I accept (and there is no anti-spam system which gives 100% no false positives - some of the newer ticket/stamp systems look promising, but they are years from being universally implemented)

I was pointing out that gmail false positives seem to have increased on my account over the past couple of weeks. And it appears that at least one other person on this thread had a similar problem.

Rew

tonyj wrote:

Unfortunately my email address has had to be published on a website to let customers contact me. So there's no getting around that. (Okay, there's the workaround of displaying the address as a gif, but I like the 'one-click' thing)

You can encode your mail address in to a javascript function that when clicked returns the correct address string. Spam bots dont generally understand javascript