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Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

I concur. Spam is only a "solved" problem on services like Google Mail if you consider a high rate of false positive detections to be a solution. I suspect this is one reason that many of my friends now use Facebook as their default messaging system -- which is a pain for those of us who don't want to use Facebook, and even more so if we send our e-mails from a personal domain that tends to get arbitrarily flagged as junk by services like Google Mail and Hotmail the first time we write to each friend.

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If you think gmail has a high rate of false positives, I encourage you to try Hotmail or (especially) Yahoo.

Yahoo works pretty well for me. Occasional false positives and negatives, but it's generally about right.

My experience w/Yahoo! mail is surreal. It even marks my own mail as spam. And misses lots of real spam.

(i use gmail primarily, but have an old Yahoo! address for bacn)

Really? Hmm, maybe it's because it's a very old address, but my Yahoo spam filtering is terrible.

For example, I get a few very similar Canadian pharmacy junk messages every single day. Even though I usually mark them as spam, they continue to appear in my inbox. It never learns. Additionally about 1 in 4 order confirmation emails ends up in the Junk folder.

> Hmm, maybe it's because it's a very old address, but my Yahoo spam filtering is terrible.

My understanding of Bayesian spam filtering is that it's supposed to get better over time, not worse.

Supposed to, yes. Until my ISP moved to GMail and hugely upped the spam filtering without telling me (not impressed), I had much the same observation with Thunderbird - its junk filtering was getting less accurate, not more.

I use Thunderbird and find that spam comes in waves. I'll get a smattering of spam emails in my inbox, flag them as such, and the number tapers toward zero. Then, a month or two later, another smattering will appear, after the spammers realize the filters have adapted and change the composition of their spam emails.

If you get any false positives, then it isn't anywhere near right.

I think most people would agree that the Yahoo spam filtering is vastly inferior to Google's

I wouldn't agree, but I find Gmail to be awful to use. So I'm already biased.

I have the same problem, and I'm at a loss as to what to do about it.

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