[allochthon]

My Gmail account is an early one, and several times a month, emails intended for other people with the same name end up in my inbox. Some of them are from actual people; a lot of them are from services that don't do a proper email verification step. It also seems one strategy of script kiddies is to add lists of emails they obtain to legitimate services that don't do an email verification step. I'll flag these messages as "spam" even if they're from some well-known company.

In the past few months, things appear to have changed, and emails that are obviously spam, complete with the misspelled titles and funky case and punctuation, are now appearing in my Gmail inbox. It looks like the Gmail spam filter is becoming less effective.

I would love for email to be opt-in on a per sender basis. If I haven't opted-in to receive email from someone, perhaps a request is added to a queue that I can check from time to time (with its own spam filter), and until the request has been accepted, no email will arrive from them.

[illamint]

I empathize with this so hard. I have an early first-initial-last-name Gmail account as well. It's both very generic in the United States, and when combined, a common first name in Brazil. It's nearly unusable at this point, but I've had it since 2004 and it'd be very difficult to migrate away from it. I have a filter to delete any email from a .br domain, but just the amount of Brazilian spam that makes it through is torrential.

[tenuousemphasis]

>In the past few months, things appear to have changed, and emails that are obviously spam, complete with the misspelled titles and funky case and punctuation, are now appearing in my Gmail inbox. It looks like the Gmail spam filter is becoming less effective.

Yes, I've noticed the same thing. Emails that are quite obviously spam (multiple recipients, complete gibberish, PDF attachments) are getting through the Gmail spam filter.