My Gmail Spam Box

Something I do more and more is to mark mailing lists that I can't get off of as spam. Some require long-forgotten passwords or multiple responses to e-mail robots to unsubscribe. Much easier to let Google treat it is as spam than to work out some e-mail command list manager interface circa 1996. That's why you should make it really easy to unsubscribe from your mailing list - if multiple people are marking it as spam because they can't unsubscribe, Google is going to eventually decide that it is spam, and not send it to anyone.

There's 4603 spam e-mails in my spam folder today. I don't delete them anymore, Google trashes them after 30 days - so the number is a good indicator of volume of spam in the previous month. It's getting worse. The number was hovering around 2000 only a few months ago. It's half my own fault - I have dozens of e-mail addresses connected to one thing or another, all funneling into the same place. Google's spam filter is reasonably good, but there's still some spam getting through, and an occasional false positive.

Something I've asked Google to do is to let me direct all Chinese and Arabic language e-mails to my spam box. I might get one or two genuine foreign language e-mails a month, and if they're French, German, Spanish or even Danish, I might see they're genuine and machine translate them. But with Chinese or Arabic, I don't stand a chance and when I've tried translating, it just confirms what I already thought - it's spam. Another idea - maybe they could put a 'translate' button on the interface for foreign language e-mails. They already have the translation service.

Posted by Alexander at October 24, 2006 10:55 AM

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