Thursday, July 07, 2005

GMail and spam filtering: Google's engineers are not perfect after all

Google Accounts

I love GMail -- except for the spam filtering. It's broken in an impressive way. Google's spam filters miss a lot of spam (so it shows up in my inbox) and they label a lot of my email as spam when it isn't (possibly a problem with how they handle redirects). Of course since GMail is a free/beta product there's no-one to complain to -- or even give feedback to. Actually, there is a feedback form. Update: it's a Potemkin feedback form. Use it and you get a form letter email that says to resubmit feedback after reading the form letter -- but the form letter doesn't include what was written using Google's web page. This manages to be worse than nothing!

My regular ISP, using standard open source spam management solutions, does a far better job.

Google arrogance perhaps? definitely.

Update: When you mark a message as 'not spam', GMail is supposed to add the sender to one's contact list. Contacts are supposed to be 'white listed'. This is broken, GMail is not always adding the sender correctly. I'm adding the sender for miscategorized email manually to my contacts list.

No comments: