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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

Whatever, I never get spam with Gmail.

Me neither! One of the points I try to make at the end of post though is since gmail seems to stop all spam anyway, lets all just start using a nice readable email address on the internet.

From your article:

Its pretty well established that “email AT domain DOT com” offers only marginal protection from spammers

And yet the 1.5 year experiment pointed out by eli indicates that this form of obfuscation is among the most effective ways to avoid spam:

http://techblog.tilllate.com/2008/07/20/ten-methods-to-obfus...

How do you know Gmail doesn't misclassify valid mail as spam? This is what terrifies me about the thought of using a spam filter: false positives.

GMail's filter is actually incredibly accurate, and if you periodically scan your spam for anything that shouldn't be in there, you've really got nothing to worry about.

I've only found three or four false positives in the five and a half years I've been with GMail.

When I used spam filtering I was receiving perhaps ten spams for every valid mail. This made it very difficult to scan my filtered mail. There was just so much of it.

When using Gmail I have a bunch of filters that make it easier to read through my spam mail.

For instance: IF X email is in the spam folder AND contains any of the words (Cialis, Viagra, Rolex, etc...) -> Move it immediately to the trash.

This cuts down the number of emails that stay in my spam folder by a huge margin, and makes it much easier to check for false positives.

That being said, I no longer even bother checking. I've been with Gmail for 5 years and I've never had a false positive.

so if someone includes the word 'specialist' in an email to you, you would never see it. spe cialis t

Yes, the Scunthorpe problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

After college I worked as a network administrator for a doctors office that dealt with pain medications. We constantly had problems with work mail going to the spam folder when it actually concerned drugs like Vicodin.

The salient point here is the email have to already be in the spam box. If Gmail already thinks it's spam AND it contains any of the keywords, then it gets trashed.

That being said, you still have a point.

If you've reviewed the spam folder so closely you're certain you have no false positives, it may not be saving you any time. If you give it a more cursory review, then your claim is really, "I've never noticed a false positive."

I've seen one false positive since I started using Gmail in 2005. It was an important email, but I'm far from terrified.

I don't know, but I don't sweat it either. Anyone who is sending me super-important email has other ways of contacting me if they don't get a response. And in the case that they dont, a missed email still isn't the end of the world.

If you rely on business leads where the sender is also contacting competitors, those "others ways" won't always matter and you'll just miss the job. That's my concern.

That said, I openly list my email address online (and have with the same address for 12+ years) and have really average filtering that leaves me deleting spam that slips through and chasing down false positives.

For about 1 year I checked my spam folder. After never seeing a false positive, and only 1 or 2 spam in my inbox, I stopped checking.

aside: for poor man's obfuscation (like in my HN profile) I do jhl805atgmaildotcom ... my belief is that this is hard to extract automatically.

If the regexp:

  ([^\s]+)\s*[Aa][Tt] *([^\s]+)\s*[Dd][Oo][Tt]\s*[Cc][Oo][Mm]

matches text in an exemplar, it's worth checking out as a possible email address (assuming one is a low-down, good-for-nothing spammer)

Yours is no harder to pull out automatically than the examples in the original article, and the above regexp took me under 2 minutes to write and verify. It's not your "obfuscation" that's saving you, it's gmail's spam filtering.

My take on this: the benefit of filtering spam largely outweighs the downside of false positives (which, as far as I know, never happened to me and if it did, it probably wasn't that bad since I didn't notice). If someone really needs to contact me, the said person can message me on my various social profiles or simply call me.

I don't use gmail for anything that can't be missed. I periodically run a search in my work mail Spam folder for my first name - anything addressed to me will have Jacob in it, but the spam can't work it out from the address (jaldridge@).

Found one false positive in the last six months, and even that was a mailing list so didn't matter.

It hardly ever happens. Real-world example: http://twitter.com/textfiles/status/6234139001

Sure you do, it just gets filtered into the spam folder.

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