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Comment by jacobobryant | Hacker News Reader

Me too, and the vast majority of time they're delivered to the spam folder--seems to be working pretty well.

Again, because of the incentives, the vast majority of them being delivered to the spam folder still means a significant chunk of e-mail that does not go in to the spam folder is spam, and that a bunch of e-mail that is not spam ends up there.

> a significant chunk of e-mail that does not go in to the spam folder is spam, and that a bunch of e-mail that is not spam ends up there.

Maybe for you, but not for me.

Well, that's great for you, but the systemic realities are nonetheless a very real problem.

> the systemic realities are nonetheless a very real problem.

If you have data/industry experience in support of this, I am genuinely interested to hear about it, otherwise it seems like a case of my anecdote against your anecdote. It is not clear to me as a layperson that spam misclassification is indeed that big of a problem.

https://www.sitepoint.com/spam-roi-profit-on-1-in-125m-respo...

In terms of industry data, spam filters are generally seen as effective with about 99% effective, though Google has claimed they've achieved about 99.9% efficacy in the last few years, though there's some question as to how they are measuring that.

The problem is, even at 99.9% efficacy, with around 50% of all e-mail being spam (that number used to be much higher, and there's some question as to whether the drop to 50% is a trend or a reflection of failures to detect/identify), that's still a lot of spam getting through.

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