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.
December 1st, 2005 at 10:47 am
Hi,
I found your page by google, searching for a solution for a problem similar to yours; you see, i use thunderbird for all my mailing needs, and to have to go to the web interface every once in a while to scroll thru a list of mostly bull is really starting to bug me off.
Ive been thinking maybe a filter moving all email to some other folder than inbox would solve the problem? been to lazy to try it thou.
If you try it, and it works, or you find some other solution, it would be nice if you contacted me, as i probably wont check back here.
Regards,
flum
May 26th, 2006 at 7:04 pm
[...] The spam filter employed by gmail, which I’ve commented on before, has significantly improved. It lets the occasional spam through to my inbox, but it is sending far fewer legitimate messages to my spam box, including emails from sites I’ve only just begun communicating with (ie: sites not already in my “white list”). Now if they could address the non-optional Sender: headers they send, it would basically be perfect. [...]
August 8th, 2006 at 1:56 am
The same to me.
”
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 got lots of spams everyday, but there are 1 ,2 emails thats from our clients, i hate that, i try to find a way to diable the spam, but no way. i try to create a filter, but it will not allow me to store it in the Inbox.
hope there is a way soon.