Gmail Spam Management Doesn’t Go Far Enough

Gmail spam management sucks! For months, I’ve been telling it the quota reports from my server are not spam, but it never learns. I have to sift through the spam folder several times a day to pick out the important mail. What’s the point in a spam filter that I have to manually re-filter?

I have 6 gmail accounts, one strictly for junk email. Compared to everything else I’ve ever used, gmail wins hands down. In my 5 accounts I have setup for various things, I rarely get any spam, in the one I have setup for junk, I get on average, a few hundred emails a day, of which I may actually want 2 or 3, which gmail seems to get right, 95% of the time. I’m sold.

Chris, you have my number, please feel free to call me. If there’s enough interest, I’d be willing to write an eBook on the subject.

Gmail is a robust and powerful web-based email client… How did it become a “time suck”?

The system we use for Shift+One Media is fairly complex and takes full advantage of the power built into Gmail. It’s an amazing piece of work.

We’ve reduced our spam down to almost zero. There’s a reason why people have recommended Gmail. It’s because it works.

Gmail spam management sucks! For months, I’ve been telling it the quota reports from my server are not spam, but it never learns. I have to sift through the spam folder several times a day to pick out the important mail. What’s the point in a spam filter that I have to manually re-filter?

Richard, this is an easy fix. Please feel free to drop me an email.

md

Why would you want to empty your Gmail spam folder? I cannot think of an email preoccupation that is a greater waste of time then needing to have one’s spam folder empty. Old spam is cleared automatically, that’s part of the whole point of that folder. Just leave it alone.

Also: since you apparently use Outlook (or some other email app with Bayes filtering I presume), why not just keep using that filtering and train that filter? There is no need for you to log into Gmail in order to mark things as spam. It’s a communal system: if you don’t mark that particular message as spam then somebody else certainly will. Here’s another way in which you haven’t ‘gotten it’ and are still thinking like a POP user. Do not waste your time training Gmail if it’s inconvenient. Gmail trains itself. Also, the results of your efforts will be frustrating since it takes much more than one person marking a type of email as SPAM before it actually starts being handled as such.

Use your POP client’s filter in combination with Gmail’s, and you’ll have a front-line of communal spam identification, and a second-line of defence for the spillover.

And stop transporting all of your standalone client assumptions over to Gmail without re-examining them. Gmail is not Yahoo mail. It’s a whole different animal.

The IMAP thing is another example. IMAP is only good for managing multiple folders. It isn’t right for Gmail, because Gmail is built on a search-and-tag model. The concept of tags is different than that folders and doesn’t really work right with IMAP — you’ll end up with tons of duplicate copies of your emails.

Gmail isn’t perfect. But you do have to make some effort to ‘get it’ before you start with the criticism if you want it to carry any weight.

Chris,

you do recognize it’s called “Google Mail”, not “Google Spamfilter”, don’t you? The system is meant as a web mail solution, not a spam filtering service. If you don’t like their approach to web mail, then so be it.

The filtering works very well for me, although having to sort through 2000 spam mails to find the few false positives once in a while feels like fishing for a lost ring in a clogged toilet with my bare hands.

Cheers,
Jochen

why is that a person who earns an income from the online World, finds it necessary to compain about a free spam filter “work-around” ..? dude … it ’s free. go and pay for something. and if that’s not good, then whinge.

it’s a free solution. a solution that works well for me and many, MANY others. the fact that it does not fully meet the demands of your obvious and self-stated popularity, does not indicate that is an ineffective solution.

and the “12hr time-suck” is a gross-exageration of the time required to set this “work-around” up. for us “ordinary folk”, it’s closer to 15 minutes.

[IMG] Chris Pirillo Windows Vista Loses UsersGmail Spam Management Doesn?t Go Far EnoughMy Wife is a Chinese Symbol Parallels vs VMware Fusion - No Contest? Spy vs Spy vs You DRM is Depressing The Initial Gnomedex Decompression Windows Vista Complaints Department What to Do with Old Electronics

Hi Chris,

It seems like you’re using Gmail the roundabout way. The way you’re doing it, it’s coming to you first, then you send it to gmail’s server, then it comes back to you afterwards. Seems awkward. We’re doing a similar thing at Shiftplusone, but the way we do it is to have all of the email addressed to the site to come straight through to gmail, and then we get it from there. The labeling we use lets us automatically sort what we need into predefined categories, whether it’s to me, or to mark1davidson, or pertaining to specific aspects of new media advertising. The one thing we don’t have a problem with is spam. In fact, I have three gmail accounts, including one that is my standard throwaway email address for those times when I’m required to register for something online, and even that one, with about 25 spam emails every hour, rarely has anything slip past the filters. In three years, only five emails have made it through that should have been flagged as spam.

It’s hard to say if that would work for you, though, if you don’t care for that Google gmail interface. I like its searchability, and in three years of using it, I’ve found it to be one of the most intuitive interfaces I’ve ever used. I’ve stopped using other email interfaces; by comparison they seem clunky.

I’ll be happy to help if you have any questions.

Tony.Deconinck@shiftplusone.com, or Mark.Davidson@shiftplusone.com

I hope you find a way to make it work better for you.

Nice constructive criticism. I really hope Google sees this and improves their product as a result. Though I must say, Google’s spam filters are far better than Yahoo!’s. Yahoo sent all of my regular emails to the spam box and all of the advertisements for Yahoo! in my inbox. I was ahead to just read my mail from the spam box and check the inbox for spam.

Tony,

You like the Gmail interface. For a few years there, I was using Gmail as my email client exclusively. As you know, I’ve since switched back to using a desktop email client and the VersaMail client on my Treo.

They only time I go spelunking into Gmail is when I want to re-configure something or add additional functionality. Otherwise, I rarely interact with Gmail through a web browser.

Because of the storage limitations inherent to all handhelds, I don’t mirror my email on both clients. If I’ve already downloaded mail to my desktop client, I don’t need to store it again on my Treo. However, I can always access any email in Gmail through the Treo web browser. This setup offers me unparalleled flexibility and convenience.

Why POP3 and not IMAP for Gmail? At least then, I could have access to various folders from anywhere (rather than labels that are only manageable on gmail.com.

Chris, are you using Gmail as a relay or are you using Gmail end-to-end?

–Sidebar–
Tony: I see what you did there.
(Normally we write the mailto markup using javascript variables instead of HTML to prevent our email addresses from being spidered by spambots).

You might like to try Spam Sleuth from BlueSquirrel.com It works well for my spam problems: http://www.bluesquirrel.com/products/spamsleuth/

I would like to know if there is a way for me to tune the spam filtering myself. Or access to rules or something that I can do on my own to optimize the filtering.

It seems once you have flagged something as spam, there is no way to reverse that. I have accidentally marked a couple of emails as spam and now I am unable to retrieve them without going into the spam folder and searching for them manually.

Search does not work because it seems to exclude anything in the spam folder as a search target.

I get anywhere between 700 - 1,000 spams overnight (almost all properly flagged as spam) but, I still need to search for the false positives that I can’t seem to correct or retrain the spam filter to change.

I know this is a little off topic, but I would also like to sort my email sometimes. I wish they (at Google) would add this simple feature. Their method of labeling and filtering is not very effective for what I need to do when it comes to managing my email.

I hope someone can shed some light on the spam filtering issue.

I received several emails from this thread and I am actively working on a solution.

The solution to Richard’s issue is an easy and quick fix. Because his quota reports are likely originating from the same email address.

Richard, just add the originating email address of your report to your Contact list.

Others have a bit more complex of an issue that will require some creativity. Since we haven’t experienced some of these challenges ourselves, I don’t have a preexisting go around to share. However, based on the information I’ve received from those who’ve emailed me, I expect to be able to figure one out.

Sooner or later, Shift+One Media is going to face a similar problem with the spam filter. Might as well take a few minutes each day to figure it out in advance and share that solutions with others.

Please excuse my English and grammar… yikes. I need to get into the habit of posting in StarOffice and then copy and paste into the little comment box.

!

Up until a week ago, the gmail’s spam filter was almost 100% accurate. Then it happened. I was looking for some programming scripts and joined a Google group (thought it would be safe) and all of a sudden I started getting tons of spam that passed the spam filter and filled my inbox with a bunch of trash. I typically use my yahoo e-mail address when I need to use an e-mail address when signing up for something online, but I thought the Google groups would be safe enough. NOT!!! I post this as a warning. I’m easily getting 100 spam messages in my inbox daily. I faithfully mark them as spam, but see no difference. Thought I’d warn everyone.