Alioth's Journal: How does Google Apps cope with spam?

I'm thinking of handling my domain using Google Apps (as well as someone else's - the reason I want to handle mine is to see how it works before telling someone else whether it's worth doing). However, I have just a slight problem with spam. I get something like 350-400 spam emails a day. If I subtract mailing list traffic, less than 0.5% of my email is legitimate. Even if I add mailing list traffic, less than 5% of my email traffic is legitimate.

Can Google's mail technology effectively filter this much spam with an acceptably low false positive rate? If you've switched to Google to provide your mail exchange, how well has it dealt with spam?

My experience

[stoolpigeon]

Has been that I get very, very few false positives (I can only think of one in the last year or so) and a handful of spam doesn't get filtered out.

These are on my @gmail accounts. When I've had issues with spammers using my email on my thepeckfamily.us domain, in the 'from' field, I get so many emails back from mail servers that it overloads my ability to download them to a client - so I push it all to gmail until the problem goes away. It handles it very well. That's when I'm getting 3,000 or mo

You sound lik emy domain

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Spam assassin - with no special training - gets everything. Well, I see 1 or 2 a week. Procmail moves it to a folder.

I can't imagine Google does worse than this.

How I dealt with spam

[Profane MuthaFucka]

I do three things:

1) Bayesian filter everything - I use spamprobe.

2) Put up a webpage with randomly generated account addresses. These are not actually random, but have some pattern that you can pick out as a randomly generated address. My random addresses have 8 characters. No valid account on my domain will ever have 8 characters. example: [e-mail] is a machine generated account. [e-mail] is a good account. The webpage I have generates 1000 different 8 character bogus addresses every t

I wouldn't.

[TinaMarie]

I've been unhappy with Google's false positive rate. My email goes through SA/MimeDefang/clam before it gets to google, so only 14 messages in the last month got through to google to begin with. It correctly identified all of them as spam, but it also picked up two non-spam messages and put them in my folder (one from a mailing list, one not), as well as two semi-spam messages (ads from places I'd done business with). That's unacceptably high, as far as I'm concerned. YMMV, of course - I know a lot of p