Has Gmail spam filter become too aggressive?
I’m not sure if I’m the only one who noticed (I hope not!), but recently, the Gmail spam filter started marking as spam a lot of messages that were NOT spam.
Here’s the ones I found, while looking at only the first two pages of my Spam folder (about two days worth of spams):
- A Logitech.com shipment notification;
- My monthly Yak invoice;
- My monthly ‘your invoice is ready’ from Citibank;
- The OpenDNS newsletter;
- Two commit notifications from Google Code;
- Three ‘your password has been reset’ emails, from Wordpress.org, and other less known bulletin boards.
This makes me sad for multiple reasons. One is that while I have been able to catch some of them easily enough (the various reset password systems I used did point out that their email could end up in our Spam folders), I just found the others. That means I probably missed at least some other emails.
The second reason I’m sad is that now, I’ll need to go through all those spam messages to find the ones I care about! Not something I expected to do this morning, nor something that is particularly pleasant… Plus, I’ll need to repeat that every day now!
And finally, this make me sad because I trusted the Gmail team. I understand that spam filtering is not simple, but I would have greatly preferred for them to tweak their algorithm to push the balance in the other direction. It’s much easier for us to flag the occasional spam emails that would end up in our inboxes than to have to go through thousands of emails to find important messages!
Let’s hope the Gmail-Spam-Filter team hears this, and works toward a good resolution in a timely fashion.
What about you? How many not-spam messages can you find in your Gmail Spam folder in the next few minutes?