It's interesting that this is the top comment, I'm assuming it's because Gmail users like myself just don't see spam anymore - Google's spam filters are so good that I don't even think about it anymore.
Actually I have a huge issue with Gmail spam filters being over aggressive. Replies to my own emails often find their way to my spam box. I check the spam folder daily and notice at least 5-10 emails that are not spam getting sucked in. Even if I mark them Not Spam, the next day an email from the same address will end up right back there.
I have the same problem. At one time, more than half the Gmail spambox was legitimate email, so I had to check it every day. (It was so bad, I kept screen grabs as evidence.)
This year, things got much better for a few months, and now they are getting worse again....
I definitely had this problem. I moved from a metal server to a VPS which had a different IP address, and it's taken probably 3 months to finally have a decent enough email reputation so that Gmail isn't automatically dumping email into spam. And you have to drill down to even get to that Spam folder too.
It was at the point where I really couldn't effectively communicate with anyone on gmail because of that. The answer I kept getting was "Well, why don't you just use Gmail instead of your own email stuff?"
It's kind of scary to me sometimes just how well Google has managed to get people to equate email with Gmail.
The middle of last year is when it started for me. It only affects my personal Gmail account, though. My Google for Business account seems to work fine, and I get a lot more mail there. I can't imagine they use two different filters, but it seems to almost be the case. Either that or there is a bug in one platform with the Not Spam button not working properly.
GMail once ate (bypassed spam and instantly deleted it, silently) an email filled with travel itinerary for an interview, causing me to miss the flight booked for me and the company I was interviewing with to have to book a second one (~$1k). If you find this hard to believe, go check your spam folder and see how many emails you have. Do you think you're really only getting ~1 spam message a day? This is the dark side of Google's spam filtering.
I read that forum rant and the linked content, and there is still no evidence that Gmail is deleting emails immediately by default. I read two possible causes:
- Content Compliance setting (managed by admin) that can prevent emails from reaching inbox
- Some other service, such as Exchange, which can somehow interfere with Gmail?
Specifically, the article mentions a "quarantine" folder that is not part of Gmail. Or am I missing something?
The quarantine folder you mention is part of the content compliance settings. Mail that matches content compliance rules goes into a quarantine that only admins can access.
This is demonstrably not true. Just send mail to an email list that you are on. The email will be sent (confirm with other list members), however you will not receive it when it is relayed to the group by the listserver.
That's actually an incredibly annoying fallout of gmail's deduplication that cannot be disabled. I believe gmail de-duplicates your list echo because it sees a copy in your sent folder. I wish it could be disabled :-/
If list owners wanted this to be a feature, you could configure it on a list basis, at least in mailman. However nobody does, because it's incredibly annoying :-)
Agreed. Whenever I mail a list if I have an important message I have to ask someone if the message appeared or not. I can't verify by receiving my own copy. I use mail lists every day.
It will frequently gobble up multi-lingual emails. I discovered this when I ignored a customer in Chile for a while because he had a Spanish email signature.
> bypassed spam and instantly deleted it, silently
Do you have any proof for that - I don't want to see it in detail, but I cannot remember a single incidence where my mail was just silently eaten by google? But I agree with what you said implicitly: gmail should let users chose between "move to spam", "only flag as spam" and "simply delete"; I share your pain of having to go through the spam-folder to find the one mis-classified mail once a month.
EDIT: I have had many user reports about this but when checking mail server logs I always could pin-point the problem at either the local server config or being caught in some "you are evil" classification - the latter much more time intensive to fix....)
I'm afraid to test it out with my personal account, but I wonder what would happen if you sent a test to a gmail account with the GTUBE spam signature? You know, the one that scores 999 points with Spamassassin.
Gmail's anti-spam filters have the opposite problem, putting a ton of legit emails into the spam folder.
The other day I had to sign a NDA from Google and it ended up in the spam folder. We were on the phone for over 20 minutes just waiting for the NDA to come, until I decided to check the spam folder and sure enough, there it was.
The spam filter is in my opinion too dumb for this age. Once you mark one email from one domain as a spam, every single email from that domain ends up in the spam folder also. For instance I don't want to see stupid Comcast commercial offerings but I need to receive my invoice every month. Unsubscribe works sometimes, but not all the time.
I, too, have run into this. One email setup was moved to Google Apps, and it flagged JIRA email as spam. Once that was fixed, I figured I was good, but more recently it flagged a document share request... from Google Docs... originating from within the same organization (i.e. same Google Apps account). Left hand, meet right hand.
Yes, but Google spam filters are too aggressive. It is worthwhile adding that once in a while I keep running into a message lying in Spam that ought to have been in Inbox.
Due to a recent bad experience of email being mis-categorised, I've taken to checking the gmail spam folder again several times a week, just to be sure :-\
Yup, though for me, I've only seen this happen with two different work google apps/gmail accounts, not my personal account. In one case, it caused a bit of a problem!
It pays to check for false positives from time to time. Other than that, Gmail's spam filter is really impressive, especially given that I have catch-all enabled (via Google Apps).
The challenge with spam filtering isn't in stopping all spam, but rather with nother filtering that one random email that turns out to lead to a life-changing opportunity..