I’m sure it can’t be just me but I think Gmail’s spam fil­ter is deteri­or­at­ing. Over the last few weeks, I have noticed a few more spam mails end­ing up in my inbox. Then a couple of days ago, I noticed a few false pos­it­ives. Now it seems like its an epidemic!

Yes­ter­day, I had to res­cue at least 50 emails marked as spam. Most of these were reg­u­lar mail­ing list mails I’ve been get­ting for ever.

I’m find­ing that most, but strangely not all, my blog com­ment noti­fic­a­tion emails are marked as spam. Note that this is not the mod­er­a­tion noti­fic­a­tion. That gets through ok. But when I approve the com­ment here on the blog, the noti­fic­a­tion email proper gets flagged as spam and I have to res­cue it.

What gives Google? When I mark a mail has ‘Not Spam’ are you learn­ing? Thun­der­bird does! It seems you do not.

Update:
I’m expand­ing this post to cla­rify my grumble somewhat.

I know that Gmail has to deal with mil­lions of spam emails a day, they do a very good job. I also know that the spam­mers adjust their spam. I can see that when a new mass mail­ing gets through for a day (some­times two), but then stops as Google adjust their fil­ters to catch them.

My big, big, big con­cern is that almost all of the false pos­it­ives are from senders I’ve been receiv­ing mail from for more than a year.

I don’t mind the odd false pos­it­ive, but more than 50 in one day!

For those who men­tioned it, I do use thun­der­bird, for exactly the same emails and more: Gmail only gets cop­ies of my mail. Thun­der­bird hasn’t given me a false pos­it­ive for six months. Not one! To be fair I get more spam in my inbox with Thunderbird.

For me the tool not catch­ing enough spam and hav­ing to deal with it by hand is a nuis­ance, but if I acci­dent­ally delete just one legit­im­ate email because it got put in my spam folder as a false pos­it­ive is unforgivable.