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Dear Google Mail Team

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101–110 of 269 posts

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#101

I could see 20% false positives on spam for Linus equating to 0.1% of false positives across the board since I suspect the people emailing Linus are 200 times more likely to be running their own mail server than the general public.

I don't understand why you think that makes this acceptable.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I decided to do a quick check of my gmail; there were 151 emails in spam, and literally not one I would want in my inbox. It seems entirely likely that Google is weighting whether something comes from a private mail server very heavily, and Linus, being who he is, gets a lot of email from private servers. Not saying this isn't a problem, but it probably doesn't affect 99% of email users.

Just FYI, most spam does not even reach your spam folder.

What happens to it? It gets blackholed somehow?

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#103
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the reasons I use Google Apps for Business for email (that and I find running mail servers tedious) as deliverability is consistently simpler.

Having to use a Google product instead of your own mail server, in order to have your email delivered to Google customers, sounds like anti-competitive business practices to me. You'd think they'd be a wee bit more careful with something like that given EU interest in them...

I doubt there are very many lawyers on the spam protection team. I also doubt the people on that team have any intention of harming minor-league competition. So it's not particularly surprising that they aren't more careful about avoiding something that a) is not well-known to them, and b) they don't think they are doing.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#104

I could see 20% false positives on spam for Linus equating to 0.1% of false positives across the board since I suspect the people emailing Linus are 200 times more likely to be running their own mail server than the general public.

I agree completely. Wasn't there a thread here a just few days ago discussing Gmail consistently marking personal mail servers as spam? EDIT: Found it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9855030

Yes, Google seems to have flipped some switch or pushed some change that takes well established domains and senders from that domain and for reasons that are not well understood written them off as spam. In theory they are getting a huge 'not spam' signal back at HQ but I agree with Linus that they screwed up big time. Stuff they should know wasn't spam and have in the past not classified as spam, now suddenly is. Algorithm update fail.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#109

I could see 20% false positives on spam for Linus equating to 0.1% of false positives across the board since I suspect the people emailing Linus are 200 times more likely to be running their own mail server than the general public.

I decided to do a quick check of my gmail; there were 151 emails in spam, and literally not one I would want in my inbox. It seems entirely likely that Google is weighting whether something comes from a private mail server very heavily, and Linus, being who he is, gets a lot of email from private servers. Not saying this isn't a problem, but it probably doesn't affect 99% of email users.

"I would want in my inbox"

Unfortunately that's not the definition of spam.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#110
I had an email from a Google recruiter go to the Google spam box. I didn't have the courage to send her the screen shot.

The lesson I learned is we still need to review the spam box once every day or two.

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