I don’t think Gmail is any better or worse than other email systems. I just happen to know that it has this particular problem. My concern is with email in general. I work with computers for a living, and it’s obvious to me that vast numbers of people aren’t receiving valid emails. Whether it’s from their own paranoia, or their ISP’s, it doesn’t really matter.
Too true - I don’t mind working hard to achieve something productive, but dealing with spam is like sifting through raw sewage. It’s just horrible, serves no legitimate purpose and is degrading to humanity as a whole.
I think we’ve gotten to a place where we need email to work. We need to figure out how to kill spam before it actually gets worse. I was thinking the other day that the next generation of spam could be significantly more dangerous by being more targeted. In other words, the spammer will know something about you, and generate a subject line and a spoofed sender that will dramatically increase your chances of opening the message. Right now, you can delete spam without thinking much about it because it’s all pretty much the same obvious crap.
I wish there was something like a consensus on how to stop the problem. Mangetout is right – spammers are the dregs of humanity, and even with their tiny numbers, we’ve somehow permitted them to royally screw things up for the rest of us.
The SDMB sign up link went into the Bulk bucket.
I had to wait and wait then realized what had happened.
Only rarely. I will sometimes sign up for a new news group. They will send me an email to verify that I meant to and that will often get caught in my spam filter. But I check my spam filter daily before emptying it.
Rarely but it does happen.
I’ve got a spam filter set up that round-files (but retrievably so) anything that doesn’t have my email address on the To/CC lines (because some majority of spam does not include the recipients’ email addresses). Very occasionally someone real will send me something to which I’m BCC’ed, so into the spam filter it goes. I get a report of that, however, and can get it back. I may have that happen once every 2 months.
Friends of ours have a family domain through Godaddy. About twice a year, Godaddy decides that I, personally, am spamming their servers and bans everything from my ISP. Their unlock procedure does not usually work, either. Which means I cannot email my friends for several days at a time. I will never use Godaddy to host a domain.
For the record (yes, I am on GoDaddy’s jock again), hosting a domain with GoDaddy has nothing to do with their email hosting services. I agree that SecureServer.net is a little too quick on the “block” and has shit-for-information when it comes to unblocking, but it really really has nothing to do with their domain registration service - unless you buy a domain from them and use them to host your email. But still, it’s two different services.
I do this myself, and I ask myself why? Why have a spam filter if I’m going to check everything in it anyway? I still haven’t come up with a good answer.
If they implemented some sort of spam system, then ‘yes,’ otherwise, that’s pretty much how it is now.
Email is like postal mail in that it is not a guaranteed delivery type system. If a letter falls out of the carriers bag, it’s gone, no notification. Same for any system forwarding a message.
99.999999999% of lost messages are due to a user error, not the system error. The problem is that most folks shouldn’t be allowed to use computers.
Yeah, of course legitimate emails sometimes get filtered as spam. I work for . . . um, a company that makes a consumer product. I have one of said products, and I used my work email address for the opt-in emailing list. I find it ironic in the extreme that often, the promotional email that is sent by this company, to an email address at the same company, gets marked as spam, by the company’s own spam filter!
Except that’s not the way the system works. The vast majority of emails aren’t 'lost," they are actively discarded. Take my pet peeve - my primary email address is one I’ve had for nearly 2 decades. However, this address is not in the same domain as my current ISP. So, if I say “I’m sending from X address, but I’d really like you to reply to Y address”, huge numbers of spam filters mark that as spam. It’s like the post office noticing that the return address on a bill payment is not my home address and refusing to deliver the letter (or even more accurately, not letting me mail my personal mail from work).
Your 8 sigma number is WAY too high. While I agree that most problems are user errors, there are still huge systemic problems. I think that email is now unreliable enough that I need to follow through with a phone call to make sure important messages are received.
I know Earthlink is mistakenly discarding some legitimate emails at their mail server level, so they never even make it into the (Earthlink customer) recipient’s mail client to be snagged by the client’s spam filters. I lost a dozen or so email receipts from a legitimate charity (Donors Choose) this way; in the end, I had to switch over from my personal Earthlink address to my work address (which I ordinarily don’t use for anything other than work) in order to receive the Donors Choose email receipts.
Sadly, I think the days when you could regard email as even semi-reliable are over. If your message is at all important, better send it by snail mail or follow up with a phone call to make sure the intended recipient actually received it. Thanks a lot, stupid spammers!
I have to check my spam folder every day in case legitimate emails get in, which they do, usually at a rate of about one every two weeks.
Bayesian filtering is far from perfect, though it’s the best method yet.
I just wish spam was promoting things that I actually wanted, instead of the same crappy, probably illegal, and often revolting, stuff all the time. Not only is it thoroughly irritating, it’s unimaginative and disheartening.
Happens all the damn time. Anyone emailing me when I’m not expecting them to email me runs a pretty high risk of their email getting picked off.
a) HTML email: straight to trash, unread
b) contains a URL anywhere, anyhow, within the email body: straight to trash, unread
c) contains any of a long long list of spell-garbled words anywhere, or certain non-garbled words in the subject line: straight to trash, unread
d) any mention anywhere of a list of evil domains from which spam has originated: straight to trash, unread
e) variants on my email address also in the To header along with email addy, or in the CC header: straight to trash, unread
f) my name not in the To or CC header: straight to trash, unread
and many many many others. I also have affirmative filters filtering messages IN if it looks like the contents might be of high interest to me, thereby rescuing those emails from the onslaught of the other filters.
Yes, some unanticipated legitimate emails do get through ;), but it’s safest, especially if it’s from a company instead of an individual, if I know to expect the email so I can intercept it from the trash chute or set up a new affirmative filter.
I’ve received 31, 282 emails so far this year. The overwhelming vast majority of them are spam. It’s extremely rare that a piece of spam gets through to one of my legitimate-mail inboxes. I go months without seeing spam anywhere other than the trash can. My spam filters rock!
Addendum after reading other posts: all my filters are on my end, no server-side spam filtering. So the casualties of my own spam filters are still visible to me in my trash before I empty it. (Neatly color-coded and labeled according to the general category of spam filter that was each piece of mail’s demise)
I was pissed recently to discover that Netzero discards anything coming from Livejournal, including all of my comment notification emails that let me know if anyone is responding to things I say, and of course, without telling me this happened or giving me any option on how to fix it. I sent them an angry email and switched LJ to send the messages to my gmail account.