1 min read

Bug report: Two things that suck about Gmail

Gmail is the best web app there is, period. It's also my sole interface to email. It's close to perfect, but a couple things keep me from calling it as such.

I get a ton of spam, in the low thousands per day, and gmail is pretty good about most of it, but it does generate a lot of false positives. Given that say 3,000 spam messages come in every day, false markings on 3 or 4 messages is damn good percentage wise (putting gmail's filters as 99.99+% accurate), but it still sucks to miss out on legit email. I've found a couple places where Gmail is lacking:


  1. I have a few filters for mailing lists and email from my websites' contact forms, which each get labels. Stuff I filter on sender or receiver and label should bypass spam filters. Today I missed several messages addressed to my contact form and one mailing list message that was merely someone's eulogy of a lost friend. I don't think spammers are going to guess all my filter rules and labels to get around Gmail's spam-catcher so I think it'd be safe to skip the spam checks on any specially filtered or labeled mail. If you're on a mailing list that gets spam, you should probably fix it through your mailing list software, not your client. I can't have any false positives with private mailing lists (spammers will never join) or contact forms (it's my first point of contact with outside strangers and very important that I don't miss any).

  2. I get a lot of phishing scam email that makes it into my inbox and Gmail's phishing reporting makes you think you're doing something substantial (it requires the extra step and all), but in reality I'll get several exact copies of things I've already reported as phishing scams minutes to hours after I report the first one. It'd be nice if Gmail would kill any and all future attempts that match previously reported phishing spam.

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