[usr1106]

One problem is that Spam is not a well-defined concept. There is criminal activity using harvested or generated addresses. And there is annoying marketing from perfectly legal organizations I have given my address to. I would prefer a spam filter that just handles the first case. I can handle the second case by filter rules or unsubscribing. The problem is that Gmail tries to solve both problems with one solution and the result just doesn't work even close to reliably.

[remus]

> The problem is that Gmail tries to solve both problems with one solution and the result just doesn't work even close to reliably.

Does it? My understanding is that gmail's spam filter only tried to catch the first kind of mail? I guess if you mark stuff you've signed up to as spam then it will put those in spam for you, but that's a user choice.

[scrose]

Gmail is definitely known to have weird blackbox rules about when and why something ends up in spam. I used to work somewhere that sent out a daily newsletter to a large audience and Gmail would occasionally decide to send it to spam for people who would read the e-mail everyday.

[usr1106]

> Does it?

I am pretty sure it does. Doesn't it even say "Why is this message in spam: Because similar messages have been marked as spam before"? (Don't recall the exact wording). I hardly get any false negatives, so I don't mark much as spam. but I get regularly false positives and I mark them as "not spam". Still the behavior does not seem to improve. So I assume others marking newsletters and marketing as spam will also affect how the spam filter works for me.