How does Google Mail decide what is and is not spam anyway? Is it based on what I've marked as spam, or is it a community effort? Might I perhaps have marked one of Fredrik's posts as spam by accident?
Other than that, Google Mail just keeps on getting better and better - Google-turning-evil concerns aside. The new integrated chat works very well. (You may have to pretend to be a yank to get it, though.) One less widget that I need hanging around my desktop. The only thing it's missing is some prominent way of notifying me that someone's trying to message me, but they've done the best they can given the limitations of the browser window, and I'm sure that forthcoming versions of the GMail Notifer will have something.
Posted to The Internet by Simon Brunning at February 15, 2006 04:46 PMGMail's spam handling is "broken" IMHO because it misses the "one key idea" to spam filtering. It wasn't until I started using SpamBayes regularly that I realized that there WAS one key idea, although I had always used it myself in my own hand-built systems. And no, the key idea has nothing to do with Baysian algorithms.
The key idea is that you need THREE folders, not two. One is the inbox, one is for spam, and the third is for "unsure". A system which is good will be able to recognize when its own reliability is low and defer to the human being. Then it should attempt to learn from these cases (even if it's just collecting data on them and forwarding it to a programmer to use in improving the algorithm).
-- Michael Chermside
Good point, Michael.
Posted by: Simon Brunning on February 15, 2006 05:39 PMInteresting; I've got all of his posts in my c.l.p folder. I can't imagine that they fixed it since you posted, so does that mean we've got different spam filters?
Posted by: Bill Mill on February 15, 2006 05:59 PMBill - yup, must be. (I'm not talking about Google Groups, BTW, just my Google Mail account.)
Posted by: Simon Brunning on February 15, 2006 07:11 PMfwiw, someone has spent the last week labouriously rating all my comp.lang.python messages as "poor", and mail I send to python-dev are held for moderation. I smell conspiracy ;-)
Posted by: Fredrik on February 17, 2006 06:54 AMI WANT TO MAKE E-MAIL IN MY SITE
CAN U GIVE ME THET OPTIONS?