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.
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
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/email/prevent-gmail-from-marking-spam-emails/4030/
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
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.
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
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.
Written by Vivek on 07.30.08
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’
I have recieved messages from Google Team in the spam folder !!
Sweet! I’ve wanted this for ages and even opened a getsatisfaction.com issue on it. Well done Google!
G Mail ROCKS!! period. They are always on top of their game.
Written by Anna maliboho on 07.31.08
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.
Written by veerendra singh solanki on 07.31.08
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.
Written by michelle romeo on 08.24.08