Les Bonnes Choses

Gmail does a pretty good job at catching spam email. My junk email folder is usually chock-full of emails allegedly sent to myself, albeit with my name changed to Viagra Pharmacy.

I miss procmail.

Anyways, one problem that I have is that gmail's false detection rate (the frequency with which gmail labels legitimate email as spam) is above zero. Thus, as long as there is any chance that an important email is going to be routed into my junk mail, I have to sift through everything in my junk mail folder anyways, thereby defeating the purpose of having a spam folder at all.

There was a time when I received very little spam, owing to the fact that I reserved my gmail account for communication with individuals and used my hotmail account for website registrations and communication with faceless corporate entities most likely to sell my email address (incidentally, don't bother emailing my hotmail account, because the message is extremely unlikely to be read). The actual system was a bit more complicated than that, because I also had two academic email accounts provided by the university which I tended to use for school-related emails or to other academics or academic organizations. This system worked generally well until about two years ago when I used my gmail account in correspondence with the organizing committee for my high school reunion. Someone affiliated with the committee thought it would be extremely helpful to post the email addresses of all the prospective attendees to a website (now mercifully offline and not archived in the internet archive). After John pointed this out to me, an email request to remove my email address sent the website's maintainer, Keith Mills, was ignored, and my gmail account received a sharp uptick in the quantity of spam received.

So, Mr. Mills, should I ever see you in the streets, I hope for your sake you are wearing a protective cup, because I will kick you in the junk.