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Sure, but I think the salient point here is this: we've gotten good enough at filtering spam that looking through your email inbox is no longer a major headache. That's how I frame the war on spam, anyway, and in that sense I'd say we're definitely winning. Maybe not won, but winning.

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I worry that while this is true for us GMail users, it may not be true for everyone.

Plus GMail is a bit strict. I still get lots of false positives.

I think the problem is "solved" for non-GMail users, too.

Nowadays, setting up a good spam-protected mail server isn't very sophisticated anymore.

In our company, I'm running a plain Exim mail server with a SpamAssassin in almost default configuration and some standard RBLs. Although I have a quite burned email address, I'm getting just around 5 spam emails per day and false positives are rare (less than 1 per month, I guess).

It works perfectly for all of my personal email addresses that I have taken care to keep off of the web in spiderable form, but I get lots of false positives for my business email addresses that are out there as as a mailto:.

we've gotten good enough at filtering spam

If we had (all of us) the parent's point would apply: spammers would not be making enough money since no-one would respond. So for some people, spam is still a problem when are fooled by scams.

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