The amount of spam getting into my regular email is annoying enough to make checking my Outlook inbox a less than totally pleasant exercise. Gmail, by contrast, seems to have the spam filtering game down pat. So although I prefer Outlook’s folder system to Gmail’s “conversation” approach to sorting the mail, I have always found Gmail’s spam filtering excellent.
And having just spent some time this evening going through the listings of 1,300 or so messages in the spam folder I am still happy with the job Gmail is doing in keeping the rubbish out of my sight. It was a bit like what I imagine going through a sewer might be like, but out of all those messages I found only about seven that were not spam and some of those were from the same address. In other words, of over 1,300 messages from many addresses, there were messages from only about three addresses that were legitimate. Pretty impressive.
I’d been prompted to do the check by a post I read on Tom Brownsword’s blog where, while praising Gmail, he voiced a hunch that Gmail might have “tweaked” its spam filters with a side-effect that some legitimate emails could be blocked.
I don’t mind that I spent some time in the murky zone of the spam folder, especially given the outcome of only a few legitimate messages being blocked. Thanks Tom, but I think I’ll not repeat the experience for a while now.
Although messages in the spam folder are deleted automatically after 30 days, I like to do some batch deletions myself, if for no other reason than the pleasure of seeing that corny message: “Hooray, no spam here!”.
Comment Spammers Have Turned “Nice Post” into a Spam Alert
One of the things that I dislike most about comment spammers is that they take otherwise useful or pleasing phrases and make them part of their spam comments. For instance, “Nice post.”
It’s not that I don’t like friendly, complimentary comments. It’s just that, more often than not, that phrase at the beginning of a comment is followed by gibberish. Although at a quick glance the gibberish can sometimes look like a rational, relevant comment.
My assumption is that the “comments” are created by a bot, and the reason the “comment” looks on a quick glance to be relevant is that it repeats words or phrases from the post being commented on. Take the following, for instance, a comment on a post I wrote about how rural communities are being short-changed in the broadband department:
My first reaction was that this was from a non-native speaker of English and was probably ok enough to let through. Then I read it properly and realized it was one of those sneaky spam comments that masquerade as a real, relevant comment.
A bit more coherent than the one which followed:
Good for a laugh the first few times, perhaps. But boring and annoying after a while.
Someone once queried my mistrusting the comment “Good post”.
All I can say is, blame the spammers.