Gmail - is the spam filtering getting better, or is it just me?
Posted on Sunday, June 10th, 2007 at 10:16am. #
Photo by Robert Llefi, used under licence
I might as well be honest. I am a Gmail fanboy. I think it’s fabulous.
Whether I’m using it from abroad, or removing out of office replies, or using the mobile application, I appear to have blogged about it quite a lot in the past.
So, why stop now…
A recent addition to my Gmail-chomping armoury is better Gmail plugin for Firefox. Among other things, it automatically makes your session secure (using https://), and has a number of useful “should have been in Gmail all the time” type hacks - like a ‘filter assistant’ which makes it easier to filter emails, or a simple ‘mark as read’ button. Finally, there are some skins, too - tweaking the look of Gmail to make it easier on the eye. If you use Firefox, this is highly recommended.
I don’t use Google Apps, but just a regular Gmail account. As a byproduct of this, I run my own mailserver (to forward my emails over to Gmail and do some rudimentary rewriting), and pipe all my mail through SpamAssassin. As a result, mails with suspected spam are marked [5pam], and automatically filtered away within Gmail. Until recently, this has been a massive improvement to my spam filtering - it’s caught a ton of pieces of spam that the standard Gmail filters were incapable of. (I should mention here that I get 18,000 pieces of spam a month, so any reduction is a good plan).
However, I think about a month ago, I noticed that this was getting less useful: because Gmail has, all of a sudden, got much better at spotting spam. Much better. Instead of my setup catching around 100 additional pieces of spam a day, it’s a lucky day now if it manages to catch three pieces of email that Gmail has unaccountably ‘missed’.
Are you seeing this Gmail improvement?
I’m also, this month, using Google Calendar exclusively to schedule my working week. This is already being a great success; but that’ll be a proper review, I guess, later.
(As a small hello to the lawyers - yes, it’s called Google Mail here, yes, I know. I’m using the name Gmail here since that’s what the rest of the world knows it as, mm’kay?)
Ian Deeley said at June 10th, 2007 at 11:29am 
Ben said at June 10th, 2007 at 2:56pm 
