Sunday, May 8, 2011

The Black Hole

This evening I went to do my monthly clean out of the Gmail spam bin. Normally I just check off everything and hit "Delete All", but this time I scrolled through looking for any particularly entertaining pitches for Viagra or unclaimed bank accounts. You can imagine my surprise when I discovered the spam filter was also catching a pile of legitimate emails. Including at least one publisher looking for information to cut me a check.

I've gone through and answered all of the real emails I could find, but if you sent me a message before April 8th that I never responded to there's a good chance it was lost to the spam catcher and deleted.

I'm not quite sure what to do other than offering my apologies. Up until now I've been extremely happy with Gmail and never had much of a problem with emails going missing. Wait, strike that. It's more accurate to say that up until now I had no idea there might be a problem with Gmail spam binning legitimate emails. This could have been going on all along and I just never noticed it.

4 comments:

  1. The same thing happened to me with AOL mail!! I my spam box was getting legitimate emails also, now I always skim it before deleting them all.

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  2. I have a gmail account (obviously, since I have a blogger account), but I rarely use it for email. I abandoned it about a month after I started using it, when I noticed that it seemed to be selectively ignoring emails from certain sources. Namely, from Yahoo. I use a Yahoo Group for my gaming club, and needed to be able to reliably receive those emails (well, all my emails, really), so out the window it went.

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  3. I've used gmail since 2005 & same thing has happened to me also. I get hundreds of spam emails in 2 weeks for example, so going through it is tedious but necessary if U want 2 catch those emails. I don't know the solution, other than switch to zoho mail, it's much better & doesn't serve ads to you based on your email contents.

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  4. I find a good strategy is to search my spam box about once a month for my name. Spammers very seldom have access to my actual name if they're spamming my gmail account, so it's pretty effective.... not sure how well it would work for others though.

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