Google has always had issues with legitimate e-mail the spambox, but then again, I have yet to see a spam filter with no false positives. Google just errors a lot more on the side of classifying email as spam compared to most email services (more false positives, but less spam in the inbox). What makes this even more annoying is that they hide the spam folder so that users don't even know that it exists anymore. I al…
This is a pretty strong understatement. The spam filter in gmail is incredibly aggressive. My secondary email is a gmail account and anytime I have a registration email from a service or anything with a couple URLs in it, it goes straight to spam. Meanwhile, the product we use at work is tons smarter, but gives the occasional spam into the inbox.
I guess someone at google decided that people seem happier when there's no spam in their inbox. People seem to drop 20 IQ points when they see spam. They either instantly rage about it or send the email to the helpdesk demanding an explanation on how someone dared email them something they weren't interested in. Its a bizarre behavior. Yet, when they're forced to fish through a spam folder or an anti-spam web interface, they seem to mind that less. Which is bizarre as its tons more work.
I think the guys at gmail realized this and just erred on the side of caution by giving people as much as a clean inbox as they can handle. Even if they don't like it, who are they going to complain to? Google? Who at google gives two shits and even if someone did, how could your reach them, and if you did who has the power to change policy? Meanwhile if you run mail servers, you get complaints about how your email goes into spam, even when you have all your DNS ducks in a row and have a good reputation. When you tell gmail users to talk to google about it, they scoff and tell you to piss off.