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Comment by fooblat | Hacker News Reader

If you are using Gmail and you are not checking the spam folder at least once a week there is a good chance you are missing legit emails.

At least, this has been my experience for a while now.

edit: typo

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I have almost never found anything of interest in spam for many years. Maybe none, i can't remember a single instance. In the early years, yes there had been a few.

For me it was good for a long time, but for the last year or so it's letting more spam through and also putting some legit emails in Spam.

I was in the same boat (and checked periodically just in case), but I recommend that you re-check. In this past year, something must have changed substantially, because there are a lot more false positives. I just went and looked, and about 1/3 of what was there wasn't spam, but stuff like e.g. Kickstarter campaign notifications, and even a car manufacturer defect notice.

This has been my experience as well, but even with only 2 accounts it takes several clicks and quite a few seconds of waiting to check all of my email because it's also fragmented with the 'social', advertisement' and 'main' tags.

> even with only 2 accounts it takes several clicks and quite a few seconds of waiting to check all of my email because it's also fragmented with the 'social', advertisement' and 'main' tags.

I've kept those "tags" turned off on every Gmail account I control — I'd rather not risk having something important enter "social" or "promotions".

Just checked to see if I've missed anything and there was an email from Google Cloud feedback team. They really just spam-filtered their own email.

I check my Gmail spam folder about once a month, and maybe once a year do I find anything interesting.

Doesn’t spam automatically clear out emails older than a month? You might be missing some if you don’t check very often.

No exemplars since March 1 for me. 179 true positives and zero false positives.

The overwhelming majority of spam rejected by Gmail is rejected at SMTP time, so checking your Spam label isn't much of a solution if you don't have confidence in their classification. A very small fraction of spam is delivered to that label.

Is there a way to disable this?

Probably not. If there is you’re going to need a lot more quota.

Even if you did there would be so much junk mail you would never get through it all. That's why they have the extra "remove immediately" tier in the first place.

Hm, I have a personal domain with an email record pointed to Google. Can I route emails sent to those addresses through something before forwarding to Google so I can see the firehose?

Of course. Point your MX record wherever you want. Gmail does not accept mail based on whether the MX record points to Gmail, it accepts mail based on whether the domain is a customer of Gmail or not.

What really annoys me is that (with the web version at least), you need to click a "More" link to even see how many spam emails you have sitting unread, so I don't get a visual reminder to check it occasionally :/

You can change that at https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/labels by clicking show in System labels > Spam (it becomes bold when it's activated.)

Wow, thanks!

And yet all the marketing emails somehow make it to your inbox no matter how many times you flag them as "spam"

Gmail has never been usable without turning off the spam detection. They make it kind it a bit cumbersome, you have to create a filter that overrides it.

https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/69442/how-to-dis...

edit: and even then they think they know better and trash some mails as regardless.

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