Re:SpamAssassin is back
by PopeDotNinja on Thursday November 15, 2018 @10:54PM
(#18466244)
I forget at times that I originally started using Gmail because of the spam filtering. My main problem wasn't getting spam, it was getting alerts on my damn phone that I got spam. I don't mind checking the spam folder, as it's like having a bunch of people at the front door waiting for me to come outside. If they all knocked, I'd never go outside.
Unsurprisingly, GMail also exhibits this problem. I have to check my spam folder regularly because it gets a ton of false positives these days. Nearly always newsletters and such I've signed up for. Another category of common false positive, which is admittedly harder to cope with, is moderation notifications from my WordPress sites...it's often actually a spam post, but it seems to learn the shape of those messages and start to treat them all as spam, even the legitimate ones.
Spam filtering has always been, and continues to be, hard. It seemed, for a brief shining moment a few years ago, that spam was on the run...but, it's come roaring back in recent years, I guess as cloud-based mail services made it feasible for spammers to bounce from one provider to another, to keep sending through "known trustworthy" senders. There probably ought to be some way to punish those providers that look the other way when used for spam, but blocking them completely is likely to impact non-spammers (but might be a necessary pain to reduce spam).