Gmail and spam

In My Humble Opinion (IMHO)
#1

Is anyone getting spam in their Gmail accounts? I am, and I have two observations:

1. The subject titles don’t look anything like the spam I get with my Hotmail account (I don’t open them to see what’s inside). So Google appears to be doing a pretty good job of filtering out the “regular” junk, but some spammers are now getting around it.
2. So far, all the spam I’ve seen have been dumped straight into the spam folder, which is good. But I’d rather not be receiving them in the first place.

I don’t know how fruitful this will be, but I’m curious whether there are patterns we can detect – e.g., if your username is johndoe, then it may be more susceptible to spam than, say, john.doe.123.xyz. Does anyone get spam that goes into the inbox? How much spam do you get, if any? I’m assuming that, just as with any other email address, if you publicize it on a website or sign up for mailing lists with it, then it’ll soon been inundated with junk – has anyone dared to do that? How good is Gmail’s spam filter?

#2

I’ve been on Gmail for a little while now (since July 14) and I’ve only gotten one piece of spam. It surprised me (I just now noticed it, and Gmail didn’t announce its existence in any way). It had a coherent title and it was obviously spam, but it was correctly flagged and didn’t end up in my inbox.

(As a side note, I’ve effectively whitelisted everyone who I expect to get email from at that account. Labels and filters are a great way to organize mail.)

In comparison, all of my Yahoo accounts (even those that I’ve never used publically) get their share of Nigerian schemes, p3||1Z 3nl4R m3||t mail, etc. So, I’d rank Gmail as being more effective at spam filtering than Yahoo.

#3

I got a few of those Nigerian-type scam spams.

#4

I’ve not seen any in my gmail account yet, but I haven’t used the account for anything other than communication with friends - it’s not ‘out’ as far as use for any message boards or mailing lists at this point, so I don’t expect to get lots of spam, but we’ll see what happens.

#5

I’ve had my account for a month or two now and have it as the mailing address for both this board and livejournal and have yet to get a single piece of spam.