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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

One of the reasons I initially switched to Gmail (back in 'invite only' days) was because it seemed to have better spam filtering than anything else I'd tried (admittedly not much at that time).

I do occasionally check my spam folder and there's always a few false positives - but usually nothing critical (although admittedly I might have missed some that were and never known it)

So - day to day - I currently regard Gmail as 'good enough' but some of that is down to blind trust with little verification.

Can anyone else share their experiences - positive as well as negative?

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I've had a few hams classified as spam - mostly mailgroup messages and github notifications, generally weird e-mails originating from addresses that send lots of mail. Generally, nothing critical, or even important for that matter. I vaguely recall finding one or two somewhat important e-mails in spam years ago, but it happened so rarely that I don't even remember the details. I still have the habit of checking my spam folder every other month, but generally I'm very satisfied with GMail's filtering.

I have the same thing, a few issues of the Go Newsletter GitHub notifications have been marked as spam, nothing extremely important. There are usually ~5 "real" spam messages in there - to me a scientist, it's amazing that the system also recognizes scientific spam. I just have " In order to speed up the development of its journals, Science Publishing Group currently gives authors the Special Offers for paper publication: " in my spam folder, which has nothing to do with the actual Science journal and is just a predatory scam journal.

Could be that other GMail users don't know how to unsubscribe from GitHub/other notifications and mark these as spam to get rid of them which introduces false positives into the spam notification system.

In some cases unsubscribe links can be used to determine if a targeted email address is actively monitored or not. As a result it's not a good idea to click them for email that you don't remember soliciting.

I occasionally check my spam folder; it's been years since I've seen a false positive.

Though certainly 'I've previously had an email conversation with this person' should override any spam detecting heuristics.

Various spammers have been faking mail from addresses that look like they might be your contacts for a decade or more, and sometimes attacking freemail accounts in order to spam actual contacts. It's enough of a problem that gmail has a help page for it: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/50200

I use Gmail for some private mail, and use it at work. I always check my spam folder and keep it empty. It works for 99%, but some mails from advertising networks (which I subscribe to professionally) get marked as spam even though I have marked them "not spam" many times. For personal mail I haven't had much problems.

> Can anyone else share their experiences - positive as well as negative?

I'm increasingly finding the following scenarios to occur when using Gmail:

- Letting email I've previously marked as SPAM (same subject, same sender) through the SPAM-filter as valid email. Again. This week.

- Marking non-SPAM email from known contacts I've emailed to and received emails from in the past marked as SPAM for completely non-obvious reasons.

So you DO get spam, and you DO get false positives, meaning you also need to check your SPAM folder for important email.

Basically the one feature which once made Gmail great is now utterly broken, and since for most parts of the internet people now equate Gmail with Email, Google has now officially broken email which was supposed to be decentralized and thus not vulnerable to stuff like this.

Great stuff there, big G. Great stuff. From the rest of the internet: Thanks a million.

Sorry - not being 100% perfect at detecting spam is now "breaking email".

Slightly histrionic, don't you think?

This was the the status quo a few years back and still is for many mail providers.

I've started checking my Spam folder a few times a week. I'll often get valuable, but automated, mails end up there. Things like billing invoices or emails about private messages from various forums.

Been using Gmail since the beta and never had a problem with the spam filter either. The only false positives I've ever had were some confirmation emails from Amazon.

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