Prevent Gmail from Marking your Important Emails as Spam

30 jul 2008

Gmail has included a new Never Send it to Spam option in Gmail search filter that allows you to set rules for messages that should never be marked as spam.

spam False positives in Gmail are rare but not non-zero and there’s always a possibility that an important email may miss your Inbox because Gmail filters have marked that message as spam.

And when you get hundreds of spam messages each day, extracting those legitimate emails from spam gets all the more tough.

There’s some hope as Gmail has included a new "Never Send it to Spam" option in their filter that allows you to set rules for messages that should never be marked as spam.

gmail-spam For instance, if you work for IBM, you could say that any message with "ibm.com" in the To: field should not be classified as spam.

Thus you’ll never miss any important email from your boss. Also see: Gmail Search Commands

http://www.indianjobreviews.com Avinash

Yep. I have experienced this problem ample number of times. Important emails going to my spam folder. It is good to see them bring out the “Never send to spam” option.
http://www.miteshsashar.com Mitesh Ashar

They should actually not be sending emails from regular email addresses to Spam. I thought Gmail was that clever at least.

But, anywayz in my case they send around two to three emails of the barcamp bangalore mailing list every week to spam.
It never happens with any other mailing list that I have subscribed to.

It is also a notable fact that the bcb mailing list is the only one out of my mailing lists that is hosted on Yahoo Groups :P
Vivek

I tend to disagree with Amit. Creating a filter is not the greatest of the ideas as most of the spam mails have address forged and using a To field filter could be ineffective. Most of the good email services like gmail work on bayesian filter+ a combination of IP address origin of the mail (spamhaus list). The hueristics are collected by gmail from all the gmail accounts where good number of users have marked a mail spam is considered as wisdom of crowd and the algorithm tags it as spam mail for future mail boxes receiving similar mail.
False positives are very low, close to 0.5% and I think we all can live with it instead of getting the inbox clogged due to a wrong filter.
http://imacusers.com Kawaljit

You mean “From:” field right?

‘For instance, if you work for IBM, you could say that any message with “ibm.com” in the ~~~From:~~~ field should not be classified as spam’
http://www.technologysearchengine.org/ Tech Search Maniac

I have recieved messages from Google Team in the spam folder !!
http://www.mmmeeja.com/blog andymurd

Sweet! I’ve wanted this for ages and even opened a getsatisfaction.com issue on it. Well done Google!
Anna maliboho

G Mail ROCKS!! period. They are always on top of their game.
veerendra singh solanki

very good article. I have too experienced this problem many times that Important emails were going to my spam folder. It is good to see them bring out the “Never send to spam” option.
michelle romeo

When we send out emails to a gmail account, it automatically goes to their spam. How can we change this. We have a broadband account with telstra.
http://rlr.blogsome.com/ Rich

I forward mail collected at my hosting provider to Gmail, and tons of it is marked as spam all the time, including mail I specifically tell Gmail is legitimate. Most recently, I received a confirmation request email from Google when I signed up for a service, and… voila!!! It winds up marked as spam. Read that again in case you missed it: mail sent BY Google/Gmail is marked BY Gmail as SPAM.

The whole situation really begs the question: why would you create a filter that says “mail from this person or with this subject or having this other characteristic is mail I WANT TO SEE AND WHICH I WANT LABELED IN A SPECIFIC WAY”, if not because you wanted to see it and wanted it labeled in a specific way? Google is deciding for you “nah, you really didn’t mean that, I know better than you even though you took explicit action to create a filter.” Explain to me how that’s not “doing evil”.

Technology, Software and Internet

Prevent Gmail from Marking your Important Emails as Spam

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