The Bloom's Off The Rose

Two months back I mentioned that I was migrating to server-side spam filtering courtesy of Google. My stated motivation at the time remains valid; I was sick and tired of firing up Outlook each morning and watching hundreds of emails stream down, the vast majority of them bogus. But I had another motivation; for the past several weeks I've actually been trekking in Nepal (I wrote up a bunch of blog posts on the flights to Kathmandu, which online executive editor Matt Miller has been dutifully, periodically posting in my absence….sneaky, huh?). Since I'd be away from email for a long stretch of time, and given my daily email payload, I needed an email service that offered an abundance of server-side storage; Yahoo's premium account 'only' offers 2 GBytes, while Gmail currently provides 2.7+ GBytes of space, nominally upgraded at a 4 byte-per-second rate.

After I migrated to Gmail, and before I left for Shangri-La, I painstakingly trained the service's spam filter, recatagorizing email that was misdiagnosed as 'spam' or 'ham'. And by the time I flew out of LAX, things seemed to be smoothly humming along; very little spam made it past Gmail's inspection, and only rarely would a valid message be improperly flagged. So rarely, in fact, that I was about ready to stop tediously combing through the spam folder. Which would have been, in retrospect, a big mistake….

When I returned to Kathmandu after 12 days in the Khumbu region, I logged into Gmail and was presented with a ~1,500-unviewed-email inbox folder, along with a ~6,000-message spam cache (a payload that won't be a surprise to regular Brian's Brain readers). Scanning through the latter, I noticed a disturbing trend; Gmail would go for days filtering without fail, but then there'd be a clump of misidentified valid email, and the pattern would inevitably repeat a day or a few later. My inbox exhibited similar behaviour; nothing but valid email for days, then a cluster of obviously (at least to my eyes) spam that somehow escaped Gmail's notice.

Given the enormous amount of supposed spam I needed to comb through, I'm sure at least a few valid emails escaped my perusal and ended up getting swept away when I wiped the spam folder clean. And Gmail's inconsistent filtering has continued subsequent to my return Stateside. I'm not sure exactly what's going on; I know October was a bad month for spam, but Gmail's poor performance of late is out of character both with my initial experiences and the anecdotal reports I've seen from others. Google's got plenty of cash and talented people to throw at problems like these, so I'm not yet ready to throw in the towel, but missing valid email due to over-aggressive filtering is not a situation I'll long tolerate. I dunno; maybe I've over-trained the filter?

Gmail users out there, do your experiences mirror mine?

Followup: one thing that Gmail is doing right, which I feel compelled to mention, is Gmail for Mobile Devices. Visit the link from a PC and you'll get information about the program. Visit it from a Java-equipped phone and you'll have the opportunity to download a slick applet that somewhat circumvents Gmail's imperfect POP3 implementation (it moves emails to Trash whenever they're viewed from a third-party email program running on an external client such as a cellphone, versus the correct behaviour: when they're explicitly deleted at the client). Ironically, the only missing feature I can find on the program is its inability to access the Spam folder….which I wouldn't need if Gmail's spam filtering was working better….

Gmail for Mobile Devices runs fine on my iMate SP5m, especially once I disabled the default 'use small fonts' setting. Note, however, that although it installs fine on my Samsung SPH-A660, I get a java.lang.IllegalArgumentException error whenever I attempt to enter my username/password combination.