I've relied heavily on Gmail since the service launched 3 years ago. Brian is absolutely right. Gmail's spam filter is so effective that I was lulled into a false sense of security -- it catches the vast bulk of real spam, and its false positive rate is quite low. But it does sometimes mark legitimate mail as spam -- mail from sources I've long trusted.
In fact I think one thing Google could do to reduce false positives is to use their knowledge of your contacts to recognize sources you obviously do business with. Many of the false positives are businesses whose repeated mailings resemble spam, but with whom I have initiated a relationship.
I receive 200-250 spam messages a day from all sources, and I do glance through my spam folders as Brian suggests.
/rich
On 4/4/07, Brian Martinez
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:I just wanted to follow-up on the comment, "you might like to read your
SPAM"
It is _always_ a good idea to regularly check your spam folder. Always,
always, always. No matter what service you use, MSU, Yahoo, GMail,
etc. Not only does it help reduce email clutter by frequently clearing
out the folder, but it also helps you avoid situations like the one I'm
about to relay to you:
A friend of mine uses GMail as her primary account and takes great
liberty with the "never delete another message again." Well, she was
going through some legitimate messages from about a two weeks ago,
reading it, and then accidentally marked it as SPAM. It goes without
saying that it automatically moved to the spam folder, and now she had
over 3000 messages to sort through to find it. (Yeah, yeah, she
probably could have used the search tool, but it was one of those, "lets
use the most difficult method" types of situations, and not every mailer
has a (good) search tool). She eventually found it amongst the sea of
spam, and marked it "Not spam." So all was good in the end.
This happened about one week after I asked her why on earth she never
goes through her spam folder.
Anyway, the best practice I can recommend is like I said, _always Always
ALWAYS_ go through your spam folder! Not only do you reduce clutter,
but you also find those rare false positives.
"And that's the word."
./brm
