OT Gmail spam filtering

[Mike Clarke]

I have a lightly used gmail account which only gets about a dozen genuine emails per month.

The account has normally attracted about 20 to 40 spam emails per day which Google has very efficiently detected and sent straight to the spam folder. At least that was the case until a few days ago when all the spam miraculously stopped arriving. I'm perfectly happy not to see any sign of the spam but I'm puzzled about how it's stopped. I can't believe that all the spammers have suddenly given up but it seems odd that Google would suddenly start silently binning it without warning.

I was wondering if others have seen the same thing happening or if it's just me?

[Davey]

Yes, the same thing happened to me, but it was about the end of last November. I always scanned my Spam folder, and occasionally found genuine messages in there, but that was ok, as I looked out for them. But now, there are maybe only two or three a day, so I don't know what I miss. I looked this up on the GoogleMail Forum, and others were reporting the same thing. The basic response from Google was that: "There has recently been a huge increase in Spam, and so we have recalibrated our filters. This has reduced the Spam getting through our customers to a manageable level, but this also means that there might be more false positives". Not included was the finger, implying "Tough, if you don't like it, go somewhere else, but expect more Spam".

[Jonno]

Mike Clarke scribbled

Verizon might have fixed their filters, at long last

[Blanco]

Still getting lots of spam in mine.

[Brian Gaff]

Actually, yes. Now that you mention it, about five days ago. Now this has happened before so my feeling is that there are two levels of filtering. ie They have always binned obvious spam, but things that were borderline were sent to the spam folder for user input. if you used Imap or webmail to admin the account it seemed to learn as you deleted things from spam folders. Every so often the big change happens so my thinking is that they just watch some sources of spam and when it becomes obvious there are no false positives, the system recalibrates as you noticed. Its probably more noticeable if you have not been doing the manual admin like I do in imap. Brian

[whisky-dave]

They get deleted after a month, just checked mine I have 41 mostly for LEDs

6 from 'facebook friends' that just contain links. and a few from googleteam one which who's subject line is "Hey You have deferred e-mails shaving".

[Davey]

I check mine every day, and there was definitely a big change late last year. Once I have checked them, I delete them myself. It keeps it easier to view tomorrow.

What is e-mail shaving?

[Mike Clarke]

I use IMAP and delete them every day. Oddly there were just 2 emails this morning, neither of which had subject lines anything like the majority of really blatant spam I used to see. So I suppose it's possible that they've got more aggressive in binning the blatant stuff

[Davey]

See my post of yesterday, and what Google say.