Everyone loves Gmail and it has been hailed as the best free webmail service by many tech people. I love to use Gmail because it supports POP for free and the email space has grown up to 6GB! I’ve configured my email client The Bat to download Gmail inbox emails ever since I registered for a Gmail account. Many times I signed up in forums, social networking sites and etc but I did not receive welcome email to active my account. One day just out of curiosity, I logged in to gmail.com to check my emails. I saw a huge amount of spams in my spam folder.
I was shocked to find so many legitimate emails being identified as spam which automatically moved to spam folder. Problem with using email clients to download emails from Gmail is it doesn’t download emails from spam folder. I logged in to Gmail again and tried to look for any spam settings but couldn’t find any. Looks like Gmail doesn’t allow us to configure the sensitivity of their spam filter.
After many months of testing, my Gmail spam filter is now perfect because it is possible to train Gmail spam filter.
Did you notice that there is a “Not Spam” button when you’re viewing mails from Spam folder?
At first I thought that it is only used to move wrongly identified legitimate emails to inbox but I was wrong. When you mark an email as “Not Spam”, you’re actually training Gmail spam filter. The more spam you mark, the better Gmail spam system will get at weeding out those annoying messages. If you’ve accidentally marked a good message as spam, remember to set the email as “Not Spam” so that it future similar emails won’t go to your spam folder.
Even after months of manually marking legitimate emails as not spam, and you still find that some senders’ messages are consistently being mislabeled as spam, you can prevent this by adding their email addresses to your Contacts list. Gmail will always deliver messages from members of your Contacts list to your inbox.
I’ve read a few articles on the web complaining that Gmail’s spam filter is crap just because one day they woke up and suddenly found thousands of spam emails got into their inbox. This only happen once in a while when spammers found a way to bypass Gmail’s spam filter. When this happens, check for legitimate emails from inbox, move them to another folder such as DRAFT, then select all and use the REPORT SPAM button. Once all spam emails has been moved to spam folder, go back to DRAFT and move them back to your inbox. Simple…
Remember, Gmail spam filter is not really that good when you first start using it. After spending some time manually training the spam filter, I assure you that Gmail spam filter will be near perfect.
If you’re not using Gmail, you can get your free Gmail account here.
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Whatever changed recently (June 2011?) has been a terrible mistake. Perhaps Google wants us to think the system ‘learns’ like the iPhone auto fill, but that is certainly not the case with my account. Same addresses end up as spam regardless of how many times I ID them as ‘Not Spam’. This ranks right up there with trying to decipher the differences between GMail Phone, Google Voice and Google Chat but that’s another topic…:). Acting like Microsoft more and more every day.
I’ve had to create a Yahoo account because I’ve spent the last three months trying to “train” G-Mail to stop marking 90% of my e-mail as spam. So far, nothing has worked. It continues to mark legitimate e-mail as spam. This happens every day. As far as adding every address to my contact list, I can’t do that when I request information about something (such as searching for a new car with specific options as I’m doing right now) until I have received the e-mails from the salesperson. All of those are being marked as spam as well as messages from people who are already in my contact list. I’ve been using GMail for YEARS and have been very happy with it, I just need to get this problem fixed or else I’ll have to close my two GMail accounts. By the way, I use two accounts and they both started doing this at the exact same time, which was in June 2010. This wasn’t a gradual change, it was a huge change that literally happened “overnight”. There is a serious problem with GMail’s spam utility.
Does anyone know if the spam settings are affected by other gmail users who mark messages as spam? If enough users mark a sender as a spammer, will that affect his messages going to my account? I guess the question is – does the gmail spam filer work globally for all users?
My non-gmail messages go straight into gmail recipient’s Spam bucket and so far I have not been able to get an answer why this is or how to resolve it.
My mail server uses SPF, is not an open relay, does not send bulk e-mail, uses a static IP on a reputable business ISP, and has years of successful e-mail history.
I opened a new gmail account and sent a message into it and it went to Spam.
I am willing to work with gmail to identify and resolve the problem but so far they are a arbitrarily monolith that spits out solutions that don’t fit the problem.
Gmail spam sucks, I agree.
I keep marking email as Not Spam and Gmail sitill sends them to the spam.
I am sure I have lost many emails because of that!
I have a constant problem that my friend’s e-mail ir labeled by Gmail as a spam. I have market it as “Not spamt” many times, this e-mail is in my contact list, I have even put it for forwarding list to my other e-mail. And without results.
I love gmail, but this thing makes me crazy.
I have gmail and I use Outlook to read my emails but I noticed i currently have over 1000 emails in my spam folder how can I get my spam email onto outlokk so I can filter it and make my non spam emails?
Thank you
I WANT TO LICENC KEY FOR 1 YEAR
GMAIL SUX and has the worst spam filter of any email client there is.
Even if you mark it as NOT spam sure enough the next day it still comes into your spam folder.
How useless is that? GMAIL SUX and I am now going to have to try and get a new email address which is toilsome because you have to tell everyone your email has changed.
Interesting post!
Good to see you raising this point Ray as no one has anywhere else except me moaning about it to a couple of mates who didn’t believe me!
The gmail spam problem is far from fixable and, to me, is slowly becoming more and more unbearable!
this is NOT getting better with time!
I did all the same things as you…I have added so many contacts to my contact list to stop them being spammed and it seemed to work but ocassionally there will still be the odd one that it spams anyway!
The really annoying thing is this:
I use my gmail account(s) for some yahoo groups (email lists/groups) that send me many emails per day. all of the emails will have a certain keyword in their subject and so have that similarity about them. however they are spammed sometimes a lot because when someone posts to the group the email is coming from that persons home email address and is then relayed through the yahoo groups systemj. this doesn’t mean that gmail is flagging it as spam for it being ‘relayed’. when I said it is relayed I didn’t mean in the spamming technical sense. In fact the email is seemingly direct from the other persons home email address and then either to the groups email address or to my gmail if the person is responding specifically to some discussion I am a part of.
Despite it being easy to set up a filter to catch all of the emails from the group…(say, if the group was called hamburgers, then all email arrives with SUBJECT
‘RE:[hamburgers group] (real subject)’
and so could be filtered into a label if I was just using the web access of gmail but as I use the pop3 it’s crap. There is no filter you can make that will defeat the overzealous spam filter!!!
all they need to do is create an option in the filtering that allows us to choose ‘do not spam this email’ or something like that.
I just log in to the webmail every week and check the spam but it is annoying, especialy in the middle of a discussion with someone and then you wonder why they stopped…until you remember it is probably gmail has spammed their last response – which is usually the case.
Grrrroooaaaan
I rarely had a problem with GMail incorrectly identifying spam. It gets better and better.
what I meant is that in the above comment, is that Yahoo spam is good, and you can train it always and it has always been like that. As for GMail goes it is no good as if you need to train it so hard, keeping an eye always on the spam folder, then why to have a spam folder, make everything inbox. I needs some initial training, to be done by the GMail guys, later when thrown at our face we can wrestle with it. Note that the launchpad case I was referring to, happened log time back. But still even now its not that good
I have GMail and a Yahoo account. I never got any problem with spam, as I see even registeration or activation mails from sites that were literally dangerous were in spam and I always found them so to be later in some or the other security site. But with Gmail it made a mail from launchpad a ubuntu free cd site as spam, its crap. I can’t go telling it everything. If I always have to check both spam and inbox then what is the idea of having spam folder. The movie site registerations and a lot are spam in gmail. Moreover last week some of my mails suddenly disappeared, they are not there in the inbox, trash or anywhere. They went missing in the air. I know for sure as it was my project. I browsed the day before at my friends place, got this data, sent it to my gmail account, checked may mail if it was there, it was ok. After two days when I logged in again wooshhhhhhhh……… my mail was gone, even worse, some personal mail was also gone, picture of my relatives on a function, of which I had no backup copies, and some mails from my buddies, and some very important job mails were also lost. I know as I didn’t lod within those two days. GMail offers no support, nothong of any sort. What does anyone have to say on this? Do say its my fate…………………..
I believe if you train it well, it will work wonders. Mine is okay. (yahoo mail for me has crappier antispam system).