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Why does Gmail even show them in the spam filter? Shouldn't it be so obvious spam that I don't have to deal with it? And then only keep the dubious stuff and sh

Why does Gmail even show them in the spam filter? Shouldn't it be so obvious spam that I don't have to deal with it? And then only keep the dubious stuff and show it to me.

throwawayffffas 5y ago
They do only show you things they are not sure about. They filter out a lot more spam than what you see in your spam folder. I for one have found a lot of legit emails in my spam folder especially from smaller retailers etc.
- kevincox 5y ago
  I remember hearing a rumour that nearly half of all mail that hits Google's SMTP servers ever land in an inbox. While there are reasons such as wrong addresses the vast majority of that is spam.
  - throwawayffffas 5y ago
    I would not be surprised if it was more than half given the trivial cost of sending email.
kazinator 5y ago
If suspected spam e-mails are simply discarded, the users will not find that any false positive rate other than zero is acceptable. There is a way to reject suspected spam, which is to do it at the SMTP level (refuse to deliver) so that the sender gets a non-delivery notice. Accepting everything (pretending to deliver it) and then silently dropping some of it is generally a nonstarter.
jcranmer 5y ago
In general, what you see in the spam filter is the stuff that isn't obviously spam--the latter category is entirely black-holed. False positives in spam detection are really bad, so you want to tune your algorithm to have really low false positive rates--which means you get high false negative rates in turn. Having a spam folder to filter non-black-holed spam into allows you to introduce another level where false positive rates can be higher without being catastrophic.
- jasonjayr 5y ago
  It shouldn't ever be black holed, it should rejected in the SMTP transaction. I'd love to never have to ask "did you get my email message?"
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    I don't agree. There are servers and domains that only send spam. There's no point in passing those through a computationally-expensive filter system; we already know they are spam. > I'd love to never have to ask Yeah, me too. But email is a best-efforts delivery system; email delivery can fail for reasons other than spam-filters.
    - jasonjayr 5y ago
      You don't have to send it through the filter. You can decide @ accept() time that the message will rejected. If you intended to blackhole it; you were planning on burning bandwidth and letting the sender send their bytes entirely, and then responding "2xx OK, whatever" Instead, just simply say "500 FOAD." after DATA and be done with it on the non-zero chance the sender actually has something important to say, and needs to decide if they need to use another channel.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    The stuff he's talking about getting black-holed is conclusively spam; it's not stuff they're guessing about.
  - josho 5y ago
    The problem is by the time the message is deemed to be spam it's too late to reject the mail. Ie. The first step verifies the from/to addresses, then the message body is sent. So, if the message body is clearly spam and you reject the message body all you've done is confirmed to the spammer that they are sending to a legit email address and they need to change their message so it no longer is rejected as spam. As bad as the current system is it leaves spammers with uncertainty over whether their message made it through the spam filter.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Why does Gmail even show them in the spam filter? Shouldn't it be so obvious spam that I don't have to deal with it? And then only keep the dubious stuff and show it to me.

throwawayffffas 5y ago

They do only show you things they are not sure about. They filter out a lot more spam than what you see in your spam folder. I for one have found a lot of legit emails in my spam folder especially from smaller retailers etc.

kevincox 5y ago
I remember hearing a rumour that nearly half of all mail that hits Google's SMTP servers ever land in an inbox. While there are reasons such as wrong addresses the vast majority of that is spam.
- throwawayffffas 5y ago
  I would not be surprised if it was more than half given the trivial cost of sending email.

kazinator 5y ago

If suspected spam e-mails are simply discarded, the users will not find that any false positive rate other than zero is acceptable. There is a way to reject suspected spam, which is to do it at the SMTP level (refuse to deliver) so that the sender gets a non-delivery notice. Accepting everything (pretending to deliver it) and then silently dropping some of it is generally a nonstarter.

jcranmer 5y ago

In general, what you see in the spam filter is the stuff that isn't obviously spam--the latter category is entirely black-holed. False positives in spam detection are really bad, so you want to tune your algorithm to have really low false positive rates--which means you get high false negative rates in turn. Having a spam folder to filter non-black-holed spam into allows you to introduce another level where false positive rates can be higher without being catastrophic.

jasonjayr 5y ago
It shouldn't ever be black holed, it should rejected in the SMTP transaction. I'd love to never have to ask "did you get my email message?"
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  I don't agree. There are servers and domains that only send spam. There's no point in passing those through a computationally-expensive filter system; we already know they are spam. > I'd love to never have to ask Yeah, me too. But email is a best-efforts delivery system; email delivery can fail for reasons other than spam-filters.
  - jasonjayr 5y ago
    You don't have to send it through the filter. You can decide @ accept() time that the message will rejected. If you intended to blackhole it; you were planning on burning bandwidth and letting the sender send their bytes entirely, and then responding "2xx OK, whatever" Instead, just simply say "500 FOAD." after DATA and be done with it on the non-zero chance the sender actually has something important to say, and needs to decide if they need to use another channel.
- tptacek 5y ago
  The stuff he's talking about getting black-holed is conclusively spam; it's not stuff they're guessing about.
- josho 5y ago
  The problem is by the time the message is deemed to be spam it's too late to reject the mail. Ie. The first step verifies the from/to addresses, then the message body is sent. So, if the message body is clearly spam and you reject the message body all you've done is confirmed to the spammer that they are sending to a legit email address and they need to change their message so it no longer is rejected as spam. As bad as the current system is it leaves spammers with uncertainty over whether their message made it through the spam filter.

deleted 5y ago

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