Do you trust your spam filter?

[netmouse]

A few times recently, gmail has displayed a highlighted message at the top of an email, saying essentially, "this message would have been marked as spam if not for a filter you set up. edit filters ."

This is disconcerting, as it has never yet happened with an email that was spam. And they offer the "edit filters" link as though my reaction will be "silly me. Let me fix my filters so you can mark this spam without interference."

When what I want to be able to say is, "This not spam! Are you nuts? Why do you think it's spam?! Stop that!"

And of course it makes me wonder what I don't have filters for that they are marking as spam. Next time it happens I will take a screenshot and send them feedback, but in the meantime it's really worrisome.

Comments

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Spam filters have to be trained. The way you do that is by inspecting your spam queue now and then, and rescuing messages that were erroneously marked as spam.

To do that, select (checkbox) the message that you want to rescue. Then click the "Not Spam" button that appears at the top of the page. That should move it back to your inbox AND notify the spam AI that it made a mistake.

[tammylc.livejournal.com]

I've been going through some of my older filters recently, so that I can add "never send to spam" to them. (They were set up before that was an option, I think.) I use filtering like folders, so for the most part I almost never want anything I filter to be marked as spam. Although there's always the occasional real spam that gets blasted out to mailing lists...

So I check my spam box every once in a while and adjust the filters. But for the most part, I'm pretty happy with Google's filtering capability.