blazin's Journal: The Gmail spam filter

Over the last 13 months since I got gmail, I've found that the spam filter has been adequate. It started off in the not-so-great category, then improved to the almost-never-misses group, and stays there with an occasianal week of screwing up and letting obvious spam through. The good thing is that very very few emails that weren't spam have ever been trapped as spam.

Fairly recently (last few weeks I think), gmail started putting little blurbs at the top of the email instead of the ads down the side. A lot of times these were blog type article links if I was just looking at a mail index, or perhaps a sponsored link if I were in an email.

Normally if I am in the spam folder, it showed some kind of a recipe involving the SPAM meat-like product. Today the only remaining spam marked as unread was something offering a visa credit card. (I should note that my normal procedure is to go into the spam folder, scan the unread emails for non-spams, have it select all unread emails and mark them as read. When there's only one spam, it's fast to click the spam to set it to unread than to select the unread, and mark unread.)

So anyway, it was the only spam, so I click it to open it and mark it read (image loading is blocked so they have no idea I opened it), and I happened to see what google had placed along the top. It wasn't a SPAM recipe, it was an offer for an unsecured Visa card, so in essence, google spammed me in my own spam folder.