Yes, I think it's too aggressive, at least for my risk-sensitivity preferences. I've actually never gotten spam in my Gmail inbox, but I've had two serious fals

Yes, I think it's too aggressive, at least for my risk-sensitivity preferences. I've actually never gotten spam in my Gmail inbox, but I've had two serious false-positives that caused me problems, along with a number of less serious false positives, like mailing list subscriptions disappearing. That level of aggressiveness is too much for me, and doesn't seem to be configurable so I can tell it to err more on the side of avoiding false positives. The first incident was that Gmail flagged an important email from my landlord as spam because it contained a forwarded message written in Danish, which the filter deemed to be a language I don't normally correspond in (it is nice, to be fair, that the filter actually tells me why it flagged the message). True enough. But I do live in Denmark, and in fact a mail containing Danish is a very good signal, for me, that it should not be spam-filtered. I've moved to hosting my own mail as a result, and it's been going well so far. I use a fairly conservative host-based filtering approach. Just blocking hosts whose DNS doesn't match their rDNS rejects >70% of spam attempts, and adding Spamhaus's DNSBL brings that up to >95%. As far as I can tell from perusing the logs, it's quite conservative, and they're all true positives. And at least it rejects (if it's going to) in the SMTP session, so the sender will get a bounce rather than get silently filed into a spam folder, like Gmail does. I do still get some spam, almost all of it from legitimate free-mail hosts who I can't feasibly filter by host (mostly Yahoo and Gmail). But it's fairly infrequent.