[sandworm101]

>> I would be vastly better off if nothing ever got filtered at all.

There are layers of filtering beyond what appears in your spam folder, layers that block obvious spam long before it gets anywhere near your account. If every email ever sent to your address wound up in your spam folder you'd beg for filtering.

[badsectoracula]

Before switching to shared hosting from my VPS (one reason being that i didn't want to bother with email maintenance and didn't want to have a separate service just for email), i had my mail with (badly configured) Spamassassin that wouldn't delete mail, just add a "SPAM" prefix in the topic. My mail isn't exactly commonly known, but still is one i have for years and was made public thanks to me releasing an Android app once (after which, spam increased dramatically).

Even after running it for years, Spamassassin never marked a legitimate mail as spam, so i'm pretty sure that if i wasn't too lazy to configure it to move it to a spam folder, it'd work fine. Stuff did pass through it (at a ratio of one every four or so) but i was fine with deleting those.

What i'm trying to say is that from personal experience, i'd be fine with a spam filter that errs on the side of not marking stuff for spam and me deleting whatever goes through manually. Having to see a bit of spam mail is small cost for losing mail i'm actually interested in.

[vbezhenar]

I'm using my e-mail pretty much everywhere ([e-mail] you have it in clear text, every bot will crawl it now, not for the first time, though). I'm too lazy to setup spamassasin yet, so I'm getting a notification for every spam message I got. The only thing that I'm trying to do is to click "unsubscribe" even from obviously spam mails (may be it'll make more harm than good, not sure). So I'm getting around 20-30 spam e-mails per day. I don't think that it's THAT bad. I'm spending may be a minute every day to delete it. And I'm sure that with absolutely minimal spam filtering I would achieve almost perfect filtering.

[thaumasiotes]

I'm prepared to believe this. But it's not a defense of gmail's policies -- this suggests that in fact nothing would be lost if gmail eliminated the spam folder and delivered everything that would have gone there to your inbox instead. So why are they doing this?