Tell HN: If you haven't got your YC email, check your Spam folder

My partner phoned me on receiving a YC response email. I was surprised, not having seen mine yet - but actually it was in my Spam folder in Gmail. Since I might not have seen it for a while otherwise, I thought this information might be helpful to others.

In IRC:

   lol, didn't pg invent that spam filter?

(Didn't quite invent it, but http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html)

GMail > PG?

Fail :P

oh well, onward and upward I suppose, can't let something like this knock you down. Like it was said many many times. Everyone who didn't make it, please, by all means, keep moving forward because this is not a death certificate.

spam for me too! thanks for pointing this out.

According to a conversation I had with Paul Buchheit (paul here at HN) in the past, GMail spam filters are heavily reputation based, which leads me to believe that Bayesian filtering is not a first line of defense, and likely would be specific to each mailbox rather than universally applied. So, if it's happening to everyone, then it's a universal rule at GMail that's doing the filtering, and thus I would guess not heavily based on any Bayesian results. But I might be wrong, GMail spam filtering may have changed dramatically since paul worked on the project, or I may have simply misunderstood his explanation.

But pg did invent the most powerful recent spam fighting technique. I'm not sure why one would say the description provided in the essay isn't the same as inventing it? Certainly Bayesian analysis existed long before the essay, but I think it's safe to say that the inventor of the airplane was no less its inventor because the internal combustion engine existed before.