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high false positive with Gmail



With several score messages a day, for over a year, I have had no known
false positives with Google Mail.

On 7/18/07, Tom Metro <blu-5a1Jt6qxUNc at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
> We've talked about Gmail's spam filtering on this list before, so in
> that light I'll mention that I just discovered I'm experiencing a fairly
> high false positive rate.
>
> Several months back I switched over a bunch of mailing list
> subscriptions to my Gmail account on the theory that I could make use of
> Gmail's search tools to search through the archives (though I've yet to
> make use of that). This seemed to work fine, and I haven't used the web
> UI in months, instead downloading the messages via POP3 to Thunderbird.
>
> Today a rare spam made it through to my inbox, so I logged in to the web
> UI to tag it as spam, and while there decided to check the spam folder.
> I was troubled by finding 3 or 4 messages incorrectly marked as spam
> just on the first screen of 50 messages. After reviewing all 333
> messages, 27 were incorrectly categorized as spam, or 8%. That's not so
> hot.
>
> (The 8% is a bit misleading though, as a false positive rate would
> normally be stated as a percentage of the overall mail volume.
> Theoretically the search "in:anywhere after:2007/6/18 before:2007/8/19"
> should return a count covering the same range as the spam folder, but
> Gmail reports only 80 matches, yet perpetually boosts that number as you
> page through the results. Using my downloaded message archives, I'd
> estimate the number of messages to be around 5000 for that time period,
> so the false positive rate is more like 0.5%.)
>
> I tagged them all as not spam, but as I understand it, that will only
> whitelist the specific senders, and not necessarily solve the long term
> problem. It seems Gmail has become a bit too aggressive in their spam
> filtering.
>
> Hopefully someday they'll add support for IMAP, which will make it much
> easier to keep tabs on the spam folder.
>
>   -Tom
>
> --
> Tom Metro
> Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
> "Enterprise solutions through open source."
> Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/
>
> --
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