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Dear Google Mail Team

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171–180 of 269 posts

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#171

Post by Jemaclus »

I've been actively interviewing for the past few weeks, and I've noticed that a very large number of emails from companies and recruiters (mostly recruiters) have been marked as Spam or at least shunted off to a non-Inbox folder. I don't have any specific custom filters in place, so this is 100% Gmail's doing. I find that interesting and frustrating -- and none of these companies/recruiters have ever seen this before! Seems like a relatively new phenomenon, at least for these people.

I wonder what Google's internal metrics show...

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#172

Post by jimktrains2 »

Jemaclus wrote: post #171

I've been actively interviewing for the past few weeks, and I've noticed that a very large number of emails from companies and recruiters (mostly recruiters) have been marked as Spam or at least shunted off to a non-Inbox folder. I don't have any specific custom filters in place, so this is 100% Gmail's doing. I find that interesting and frustrating -- and none of these companies/recruiters have ever seen this before…

> recruiters have been marked as Spam

As they should be, because they are. They have terrible practices and I have never met one I would want to do business with.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#173

Post by georgemcbay »

caf wrote: post #170
dasil003 wrote: post #14

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.

The funny thing is that according to the comments, some mail from Google itself is being marked as spam.

Last year google paid me $1500 for finding a security flaw in Chrome. The mail they sent me with the ACH information was marked as spam/phishing:

http://i.imgur.com/Icfeh60.jpg

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#174

Post by jimktrains2 »

austenallred wrote: post #67
dasil003 wrote: post #14

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 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.

I find about 2 a week that have been marked as Spam and shouldn't have been. Your experience is not everyones (nor is mine).

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#175

Post by BorisMelnik »

I wonder why Linus chose Google+ as his platform for this? Seem's like he has been on a spam crusade lately, going after Github last week: https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/WHLxTZnjhmz

I also can't stand when I get added to a repo and start getting messages from every single notification.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#176

Post by ceequof »

BorisMelnik wrote: post #175

I wonder why Linus chose Google+ as his platform for this? Seem's like he has been on a spam crusade lately, going after Github last week: https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/WHLxTZnjhmz I also can't stand when I get added to a repo and start getting messages from every single notification.

Linus frequently puts blog posts up on G+, possibly as part of some Google sponsorship deal.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#177

Post by tempestn »

What would be really fantastic is if Google let you set your own spam threshold. I can't even imagine it would be too difficult. Presumably they determine a numeric 'spam likelihood' number for each incoming email already, so this would just mean being able to customize the threshold that that number is compared against. Obviously entering it numerically wouldn't be very user friendly, but even 5 levels from most to least aggressive (like Spam Assassin and such offer) would be extremely helpful.

Even better would be if you could have different handling for different levels, like black-holing or auto-trashing the absolutely-definitely spam, making it easier to occasionally scan the regular spam box. I get something over 1000 spam emails per day, so it's just not feasible to give even a cursory look over them to find the false positives. I can't even imagine what it would be like for someone like Linus.

Unfortunately, that would draw attention to the fact that the spam filter isn't perfect, and would require users to make choices with tradeoffs, so I can't imagine it's a very attractive option for Google.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#180

Post by hunter2_ »

Linus's 20% is not a false positive rate -- how has nobody caught this? Let's assume that "the 0.1% false positive rate [Google] tried to make such a big deal about last week" is actually a false positive rate by the normal definition.

The false positive rate is defined as (the number of false positives over (false positives + true negatives)). However, Linus quite obviously calculated the 20% as (false positives over positives), i.e. (200 / 1000). If Linus happened to have 200,000 true negatives (i.e., non-spam messages that were not flagged as spam), a number that I'm making up because he did not disclose one, then his false positive rate would be (200 / 200,200) ~= 0.1%.

Think about it... whether his email address was harvested by all the spambots in the world or none at all would have no effect on the fact that out of 200,200 legit messages, 200 were incorrectly flagged. This is why the false positive formula doesn't even include true positives! The 800 true positives (actual spam messages) don't matter to the formula. Therefore, neither does the 1000 total (true+false) positives. Don't divide by it.

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