Gmail Spam

January 17th, 2006

Jeremy points to a report at Search Engine Watch that compares the spam filters in Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and SpamCop. I am mostly an Outlook + SpamBayes guy, and have only recently started using Gmail in anger, and I gotta say, the filter performance is just not comparable. Given a clean archive and a few hundred pieces of spam, SpamBayes is near perfect, whereas Gmail is running at about 2 from 3, similar to the findings in the report.

Example spam

It’s big problem seems to be on the stock/investing type of spam. If it weren’t for Gmail’s excellent keyboard shortcuts it would be a deal breaker.

One Response to “Gmail Spam”

  1. Michael Ellis Says:

    I’ve been having the same problem for several months now. The stock spam that gets through is plain text with good grammatical structure and little or no funny spelling or odd characters. Its content doesn’t resemble any of my normal incoming or outgoing correspondence. I get 5 to 10 of these every day and many are duplicates. I zealously report them all as spam, but so far Gmail hasn’t learned to spot them. I wrote a complaint to Gmail a couple of months ago. They didn’t even acknowledge it.

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