A recent report indicated that email spam levels have dropped since 2003 and that is a good thing for everyone. Better algorithms and users reporting spam have all helped to curb the insane amounts of junk in everyones inboxes. But it seems the Gmail spam filter may be getting a bit too trigger happy when it comes to filtering email. Linus Torvalds, the driving force behind the Linux operating system kernel, has reported that the Gmail spam filter has been working overtime on filtering his email which includes many emails that never should have made it to spam.
When Torvalds went into his spam folder and noticed some of those emails weren’t spam he went ahead and checked the entire folder to see what else may have been sent there. After investigating he concluded that of the 3000 messages sent to spam by the Gmail spam filter, more than 1200 were not spam. More than 30 percent of his spam emails were legitimate emails that he needed to read or take some sort of action on. Torvalds did say that the emails in spam were from his mailing lists and not direct messages to him, which was a positive note.
“So it’s not like I really lost anything, except for the time I lost just walking through a week worth of spam,” he said in an email interview.
“I don’t know how to even describe the level of brokenness in those kinds of spam numbers,” Mr. Torvalds wrote in his post. “Quite frankly, that sucks. It’s not acceptable. Whatever you started doing a few days ago is completely and utterly broken.”
Our own senior editor Jason Bouwmeester has also been experiencing Gmail sending some of his emails to spam that were never supposed to go there. Google has done a great job at filtering the unwanted but perhaps it’s time for a look at why the filter has become so aggressive. Google has not responded to requests for comment but I am sure they will soon.
Have you experienced aggressive filtering of your Gmail? Let us know in the comments below or on Google+, Facebook and Twitter.
[button link=”http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/07/17/google-overfills-linux-chiefs-spam-folder/” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: WSJ[/button]feature image courtesy glenn1794 deviantart
Last Updated on November 27, 2018.
