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I have spam-filtered email addresses through 3 different email providers, one of them being Google. Only Google manages to constantly produce falls positives (

I have spam-filtered email addresses through 3 different email providers, one of them being Google. Only Google manages to constantly produce falls positives (including mail from, sweet irony, Google services like Analytics) and regularly allow spam and phishing mails through. The other two, ran by relatively small providers, are nearly perfect. Don't overestimate Google. (The same "intelligent" Google also seems to be unable to figure out which language I use, despite me telling them on a regular basis.)

kbd 14y ago
What other e-mail providers do you use, if you don't mind? A primary reason I use Google Apps mail is for the spam filtering.
- claudius 14y ago
  Spam filtering by now is pretty trivial if you don’t mind being an ass about standards - require valid HELOs, valid hostnames, valid PTR records and valid A/AAAA records for these PTR records and hostnames listing the connecting IP and you will hardly get any spam. Add to this ‘temporary addresses’[0] and train your spam filter on everything send to invalid such addresses and basically nothing gets through. [0] I use a scheme where my website and mailing list addresses are of the form claudius_YYMM@example.com. Mails to these addresses are marked as spam after the 15th of MM+1 and before the 15th of MM-1. Obviously only works for mailing lists if they’re open to non-subscribers as well.
  - jrockway 14y ago
    I've found this to be untrue in my experience filtering spam. Being a hard ass drops a lot of legitimate email, and a lot of spammers follow the RFCs beautifully now.
    - claudius 14y ago
      Surely YMMV, but so I only observed two problems: Daily wikipedia articles when delivered via IPv6 (IPv4 worked) and StackExchange while on the west coast due to one of these nice hurricanes.
eridius 14y ago
How many spammy emails do you get at each address? You seem to be measuring the absolute rate of false negatives/positives, but not measuring the relative rate.
- onemorepassword 14y ago
  I have no numbers, but the non-Google addresses are much older (one dating back to the mid-90's) and have been liberally strewn around the internet for well over a decade. They both get several times more spam than the much more recent business-only Google address, yet if their filtering lets through one per month it's a lot. I can't even remember the last false positive. The majority of the mail that ends up in my Google spambox consists of legitimate email from reputable sources (Amazon, Facebook, Google itself), and barely any actually spam. Extra annoying: perfectly fine email from our own services regularly gets flagged as spam by Google, and we often have no f-ing clue why. And don't get me started on Google Groups spam filter, which for some reason is even worse. I have to turn it off for any group-address I want to make accessible to non-members.
  - eridius 14y ago
    They may be much older, but if your Google address is @gmail then I guarantee you it gets far more spam, just from scattershot spammers. As an anecdotal example, I have an email address that's been strewn about the internet for almost 2 decades. It's currently hosted on Google Apps, but it has a non-Google domain. I get a spam message in my inbox maybe once every couple of months. I also have a gmail address. I never use the thing. But it gets inundated with spam, and every month or so when I go look at it I have to clean lots of junk out of the inbox. Since they're both hosted by Google, I'm forced to conclude that the gmail one gets many orders of magnitude more spam merely by virtue of ending in @gmail.com.
    - X-Istence 14y ago
      Every day I get hit by about 100k connections for email to my domain (0x58.com), the spammers hit <random>@0x58.com. So far they haven't hit a single actual email address that exists. Out of those 100k connections, one or two emails come through to my valid email account. So yes, scattershot makes sense, but from looking at my logs, unless your account includes a lot of numbers you aren't going to get hit :P
Semaphor 14y ago
I get a maximum of one spam mail/month. The rest is all filtered by google. False positives happen but weirdly enough the only thing I repeatedly see there are plus.google.com notifications…

kbd 14y ago

What other e-mail providers do you use, if you don't mind? A primary reason I use Google Apps mail is for the spam filtering.

claudius 14y ago
Spam filtering by now is pretty trivial if you don’t mind being an ass about standards - require valid HELOs, valid hostnames, valid PTR records and valid A/AAAA records for these PTR records and hostnames listing the connecting IP and you will hardly get any spam. Add to this ‘temporary addresses’[0] and train your spam filter on everything send to invalid such addresses and basically nothing gets through. [0] I use a scheme where my website and mailing list addresses are of the form claudius_YYMM@example.com. Mails to these addresses are marked as spam after the 15th of MM+1 and before the 15th of MM-1. Obviously only works for mailing lists if they’re open to non-subscribers as well.
- jrockway 14y ago
  I've found this to be untrue in my experience filtering spam. Being a hard ass drops a lot of legitimate email, and a lot of spammers follow the RFCs beautifully now.
  - claudius 14y ago
    Surely YMMV, but so I only observed two problems: Daily wikipedia articles when delivered via IPv6 (IPv4 worked) and StackExchange while on the west coast due to one of these nice hurricanes.

eridius 14y ago

How many spammy emails do you get at each address? You seem to be measuring the absolute rate of false negatives/positives, but not measuring the relative rate.

onemorepassword 14y ago
I have no numbers, but the non-Google addresses are much older (one dating back to the mid-90's) and have been liberally strewn around the internet for well over a decade. They both get several times more spam than the much more recent business-only Google address, yet if their filtering lets through one per month it's a lot. I can't even remember the last false positive. The majority of the mail that ends up in my Google spambox consists of legitimate email from reputable sources (Amazon, Facebook, Google itself), and barely any actually spam. Extra annoying: perfectly fine email from our own services regularly gets flagged as spam by Google, and we often have no f-ing clue why. And don't get me started on Google Groups spam filter, which for some reason is even worse. I have to turn it off for any group-address I want to make accessible to non-members.
- eridius 14y ago
  They may be much older, but if your Google address is @gmail then I guarantee you it gets far more spam, just from scattershot spammers. As an anecdotal example, I have an email address that's been strewn about the internet for almost 2 decades. It's currently hosted on Google Apps, but it has a non-Google domain. I get a spam message in my inbox maybe once every couple of months. I also have a gmail address. I never use the thing. But it gets inundated with spam, and every month or so when I go look at it I have to clean lots of junk out of the inbox. Since they're both hosted by Google, I'm forced to conclude that the gmail one gets many orders of magnitude more spam merely by virtue of ending in @gmail.com.
  - X-Istence 14y ago
    Every day I get hit by about 100k connections for email to my domain (0x58.com), the spammers hit <random>@0x58.com. So far they haven't hit a single actual email address that exists. Out of those 100k connections, one or two emails come through to my valid email account. So yes, scattershot makes sense, but from looking at my logs, unless your account includes a lot of numbers you aren't going to get hit :P

Semaphor 14y ago

I get a maximum of one spam mail/month. The rest is all filtered by google. False positives happen but weirdly enough the only thing I repeatedly see there are plus.google.com notifications…