Gmail Spam Filtering Isn’t So Hot

by Shawn @ 8:18 am · filed under Server Admin

In theory, Gmail's spam filtering is supposed to get smarter as you "train" it by tagging spam emails that slipped through their spam filters. I've been anal about going through every single email and tagging every spam email as such in the hopes that it would get smarter. In reality, I think it might actually be getting dumber though, considering how much spam is making it to my inbox these days (it's not a new thing BTW, I've been getting tons of spam in it for the last year, and it's only been getting worse).

I doubt there's an "easy" way to fix it (otherwise it would have been done), but I really wish Gmail would let us define our own custom spam rules. For example, if an email isn't in English, it's spam (for me anyway) considering I don't read Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Greek, Hebrew, etc.

Check out the most recent emails in my inbox this morning (only 1 of them [the white line] is not spam).

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9 Responses to “Gmail Spam Filtering Isn’t So Hot”

stefa Says:
August 29th, 2006 at 8:39 am

Did you know that Hawaii is the number one consumer of Spam? Those little islands in the pacific go through more spam that the entire continental united states…

spam and eggs
spam and poi
spam and poke
spam and ICE?

Tom Says:
August 29th, 2006 at 9:42 am

Dude. Wtf. In that screenshot alone I see 12 different times that you won the lottery.

mad4 Says:
August 29th, 2006 at 10:56 am

Those test_BAT2 emails have been all round the web today.

Ron Says:
August 29th, 2006 at 4:03 pm

Dont know about you but it works really well for me. I get on average 50 spam mails per hour and at most 1 slips through. Dont just mark it as spam, create a filter as well. I have emails from 3 different accounts coming to my Gmail and I barely ever see any spam in my inbox. I only started the filter because usually around 5 slipped through (from the same domain) and the spam filter didnt seem to block the entire domain.

Jimmit Says:
August 29th, 2006 at 5:22 pm

Shawn, buy me one of these:

http://www.seamlessdisplay.com/products_radius320.htm

ViciousSummer Says:
August 30th, 2006 at 1:07 am

Dude. Spam f-ing sucks. I spend a good portion of my day deleting it.

Bulbboy Says:
August 30th, 2006 at 6:37 am

My God man, how much email do you have to go through each day?

…And run a forum!

Time to clone yourself, or watch Multiplicity,
even better than Meet the Fokkers IMHO.
:D

Johan Says:
August 31st, 2006 at 3:23 pm

I got my own MTA up and running recently. I had saved two years worth of Ham and Spam to train SpamAssassin, Have ClamAV running on the Postfix installation too with amavisd updating definitions nightly. Result? No more virusses (down from 30 odd a day) and almost no spam (I hate overly tight spam rules so I expect to get some spam left). Those that do make it into Outlook/Thunderbird get nailed by SpamBayes.

GMail indeed sucks in that regard, I keep getting Spanish spam, I was also wondering when they’d realize I don’t read Spanish. Considering their ads can determine language they must know by know I don’t send Spanish emails or have any Spanish emails labeled or archived so how hard is it to realize it must be spam?

Zach Graham Says:
September 4th, 2006 at 7:00 pm

Ouch, that’s gotta suck. Gmail’s spam filter works pretty well for me. One or two slips in every now and then but otherwise it’s not bad.

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