6 ms·

I've had a problem with false positives in my spam folder for months. A large percentage of the email newsletters I subscribe to end up in my spam folder every

• pygy_ 11y ago
  You can set up a filter to never mark the matching items a spam. That's what I do for the Lua Mailing list.
  • c5karl 11y ago
    Sure, but I shouldn't have to do that. (That's a criticism of Google, not your good advice.)
  • c5karl 11y ago
    Come to think of it, if they're going to have a "Never send it to Spam" flag in filter config, shouldn't it default to TRUE? If you're taking the trouble to set up a filter, it's probably because you are interested in those messages.
    • JoshTriplett 11y ago
      Some mailing lists get spammed.
    • dottrap 11y ago
      Wait, where is the "Never send it to Spam" option? I cannot find this option.
      • pygy_ 11y ago
        I'm on mobile, so I can't send you a screenshot, but it should be un the list where you add tags, skip the inbox and so on, acter creating à filtre.
• gerbal 11y ago
  Yep, Gmail's spam filters work based on the collective judgment of Gmail users. The core of your and linus' problem is a lot of people use the 'mark as spam' button as unsubscribe button for mailing lists.
  • userbinator 11y ago
    based on the collective judgment of Gmail users I find this trend of "follow the majority" quite disturbing - it's as if they're implicitly saying that everyone should think the same way and punishing those who don't follow. What's spam to me may not be spam to you, and vice-versa. Then again, having a personalised spam filter for each user would probably consume a huge amount of resources...
    • e12e 11y ago
      Not sure why you are down-voted. Perhaps because everyone (that run their own mail) generally runs individual filtering per account. Typically spam assassin will score an email, but filtering (based on that, and other criteria) is up to the individual user (eg: by having a white-list, choosing spam score to treat as spam etc). As mentioned further up, some scoring works well for many users, but not for all, such as marking eg: Russian/Chinese/Not-spoken-here-by-most language as spam. I really see no reason for why Google should be so bad at classifying email as they apparently are.
  • massaman_yams 11y ago
    That idea sounds compelling at first, but the data doesn't support it. There are plenty of email marketers who are focused on a non-technical audience (who presumably use 'mark as spam' to unsubscribe frequently) and which have no problems with spam folder placement. There's a spectrum, and if a given sender looks considerably worse than average, they're more likely to get filtered. If anything, if a newsletter is getting filtered, it's more likely to be the marketing manager's fault - perhaps they don't adequately monitor deliverability, or they don't test their content, or they don't use activity segmentation... etc.
• click170 11y ago
  How easy is it to unsubscribe from those newsletters? Is there a one-click unsubscribe link that doesn't require you to login or enter anything before unsubscribing you? If I've subscribed to a mailing list or newsletter and there isn't a one-click unsubscribe I'll click the Spam button to get it out of my inbox instead of going through their procedure. One-Click Unsubscribe is paramount for mailing lists and newsletters not getting marked as Spam.
  • thrownaway2424 11y ago
    If your newsletter has a good reputation then clicking "mark as spam" in Gmail prompts the user to automatically unsubscribe instead of marking spam, or to do both. If your newsletter has marginal or bad reputation or does not offer automatic unsubscription then that doesn't appear.
  • danielweber 11y ago
    Sometimes I don't want to deal with the people any more. This may be an anxiety issue on my part. Fair enough. I will generally continue to do it.
• massaman_yams 11y ago
  Dragging the message to your 'primary' inbox sends a stronger signal than 'not spam'. Maybe worth a try.