Recently I've noticed how good Gmail's spam filter has been working.

It has been working so well that, unusually, the amount of spam cached in my Spam tray is down to 1273, whereas it was at about 2000 a few months ago.

This could easily be just because they remove the spam messages sooner after their determined to be spam, but I like to think spammers are starting to not bother with GMail accounts, perhaps owing to a low click-through rate.

I've not seen spam in my sacred inbox for ages now, and I couldn't be happier because of it. Outlook was simply awful for spam, and that's why should I buy a Mac, I will not be using Mail. Even if Mail is supported by Spotlight, I when I used Google Desktop Search and Outlook I never, ever wanted any results from my email. Searching in Gmail is just fine for me.

Posted by Fin at 6/21/2005 07:49:00 pm

2 Comments ~ Post a Comment

 Anonymous: I'm pretty sure that Mail uses essentially the same filter as Mozilla Thunderbird, so if you'd like to get an idea...
I'm pretty sure it uses a Bayesian (or at least some kind of adaptive) filter rather than Outlook's black list/white list style stuff. Basically, you train the filter by marking messages as spam and then it begins to filter effectively. I was thrilled with it, actually, but switched to Outlook for more power, bulk, and ugliness.
Now Outlook gives me an illegal operation every time I try to send/receive, so I may have to call it quits on that.
But don't compare Mail to Outlook. I'm sure Entourage is very Outlook-like, but Mail has relatively intelligent filters that just need to be trained. I think.

 Anonymous: Hey, look; this guy says:
"Spam filtering in Mail has also improved; it's much more accurate than the spam filtering in Jaguar. After training Mail, I hardly get any spam in my inbox, nor do I get any real mail in my junk email folder."