dpk’s weblog

I sure enjoy this new show on Comedy Central. I am kind of bummed it appears to have already gone in to re-runs after it’s first week, however. Unless I just got a bum feed, Monday night’s show was a repeat of some show last week. If it was a new one, anyone got a torrent? :)

Gmail is pretty sweet. I moved all of my personal mail to gmail a while back, and have been enjoying its interface. I like that I can search my emails offline, with Google Desktop. There’s just one problem:

1/3 to 1/4th of the mail sent to me is misclassified as spam.

It’s mostly mailing list messages, such as freebsd-questions, debian-users, bugs@dragonfly, etc, but it also catches password change confirmations and other important messages. For some reason there’s no way to disable the spam filtering. The result of all this is that I have to check the spam box frequently, throughout the day, to ensure I’m getting all of my email.

I suspect it’s possible that there are some people on gmail flagging everything as spam, either to intentionally screw up the spam database, or because they just don’t know what they’re doing. I dunno. I’ve contacted Google to try to find a way to disable the spam filtering for my account and to ask, in the alternative, if there’s a way I can prevent so many of my legitimate emails from going to the spam box. The autoresponder they sent went… you guessed it… straight into the spam box.

Gmail is still in beta. It works very well (other than this one significant issue), in my experience. I have tons of invites if anyone wants them. I’ll be watching my inbox and my spam box just in case.

Update: Gmail has confirmed there is no way to disable the spam filtering, so I have to live with handling the false positives for now.