[lmm]

Yes, spam filtering is scary. The first thing I've done with every email account I've used is turn any black-box spam filtering down to the minimum (gmail was the first that wouldn't let me turn it off entirely, and it took a long time before I trusted gmail for anything important for just that reason).

Filtering into "email that I want a push notification for" versus "email that I'll read in a few hours when I check" makes sense. What I don't get is people who are using this as a way to divide into emails they'll read and emails they won't read. Given that genuine spam is so rare these days, any email that gets as far as you gmail "unimportant" inbox is an email that you in some sense requested; if your inbox is full of mailing lists and newsletters that you don't read, wouldn't unsubscribing be a better route than filtering them out?