For me it's quite uncommen that legitimate emails go to the spam folder - one every few months, so I usually just check it every couple weeks or so. It's much more common that spam comes to my inbox, forcing me to mark it as spam. Of course - I'd rather have it this way.

I don't trust Google's gmail spam filter because of the issue with false positives. And I get a lot of spam, so it's impractical for me to go through the spam mailbox.

I'm very happy with my paid spam filter service (SpamStopsHere.com) which reduces the false positive rate, possibly at letting slightly more spam through -- but that's how I'd like to prioritize it.

I wrote about it a few years ago: http://normalkid.com/2007/08/21/my-spam-solution/

(Also, I get an absurd amount of spam. My MacRumors address gets 400,000-500,000 spam emails a day, which are blocked.)

Good advice. I was getting emails from zoneedit (DNS provider) letting me know I needed to pay for more credits, even though when I logged into zoneedit the balance was 0 and no mention of credits being needed. Anyway, the emails where being picked up as spam by gmail so I had no idea the account was in deficit.

A weeks or so before xmas our main domain went dead and took 6hours for most users and up to 24+ for others to be able to access the site again. We provide an on line SaaS solution to schools so luckily it was almost the holidays; things could have been much worse.

Gmail is normally so reliable for me that, up until a couple of weeks ago, I only checked my spam folder every month or so. For some reason, Gmail decided an email (forwarded from another address of mine that I linked to my account) from someone I regularly communicate with was a forgery and put it in the spam folder. All it contained was the sender's phone number and some instructions regarding meeting him at an airport before a flight we were going on. I didn't meet him where he asked me to because I never saw the email. Thanks Gmail; I check my spam more frequently now.

Whenever I receive emails from LinkedIn telling me to create an account(mailed by those clueless people that give his/her whole contact list away), I click report spam. If there was a easy link on the bottom of the email to opt-out, I would do that. Since there isn't, I assume it's their problem to deal with my spam report.

I just checked, and saw that I had over 200 spam emails from just yesterday. Thank heaven for Google's spam filter.

I just clicked and found only the Blogger newsletter in spam folder. Wtf?