You know that handy Gmail spam filter that is keeping most of the spam out of your inbox? It’s also totally broken and destroying the connections you’ve spent your entire life building.
Is it possible to put a price tag
Gmail’s spam filter has always been aggressive. Why? People get tend to get a lot angrier when they see spam than when they see a lost email from some distant cousin in the spam folder. Also, people don’t really check their spam folders ever, as you probably know if you’ve ever run a business that tries to communicate with customers.
Now the Gmail spam filter is simply off the rails. The latest revelation: if you mark a message as NOT SPAM, future messages from that sender will STILL go to spam if Gmail thinks it’s spammy.
Here’s a help blog where they admit: “You may have to do this a few times before Gmail learns not to mark messages like this as spam in the future.”
Is it possible to put a price tag on a bad spam filter? Just ask Cobb County schools, who lost $250,000 because their filter penalty-boxed a bid from a vendor.
The machines have taken over. I guess Google thinks you’re too weak-minded to know what spam is. Honestly I think some Google programmer thought that your clicking that button means “a vote for someday considering this kind of email legit” as opposed to “hey I’m the human here so HANDS OFF.”
I think the saddest indication of the state of affairs is when you find emails from Google in your spam folder. No, you idiots, email from my Google calendar is not spam.
Solution: add the senders of spammed messages to your contact list. This isn’t ideal because sometimes you don’t want newsletter senders clogging up your contact list. [Update: I just saw an email from a friend who’s in my contacts that got spamfiltered by these bastards. So even that’s not guaranteed.] But that’s the world Google wants you to live in.
