During an occasional foray into the spam folder this weekend, to grapple with the 1800+ messages that had accumulated since my previous foray a few weeks ago, I discovered only three false positives (approximately 0.17%):
- Shots, Shows, And Shirts, from Snap Shots
- Edublogs and EduBling!, from Edublogs
- Sept sessions and Nov online event, from Cathy Baxter
However, the third one, which was the first that I had detected in rapid glances at twenty-five senders per page, was a noodle twister. I had recognized the sender on first glance, and the subject was innocuous.
Nevertheless, a gmail-generated warning superimposed on body of the message suggests that the links in the message itself were the problem:
Warning: This message may not be from whom it claims to be. Beware of following any links in it or of providing the sender with any personal information. Learn more
([within] personal correspondance, September 24, 2007)
Indeed, inside were truncated, somewhat destination-opaque links through tinyuurl.com to Eluminate Live! sessions (closed Sep 26, 2007):
Although those links were in a message from a recognized sender, and in context of a legitimate, far less destination-opaque link:
Gmail spam filters apparently caught those tiny URLs!
In a similar foray into my Gmail spam folder on June 7, 2008, I waded through over 2000 messages that had accumulated since May 18. On that foray I discovered only one false positive - less than 0.05%. Fantastic!
ReplyDeleteIt is about nine months since my last Gmail spam assessment (previous comment, 2008.06.07). Nevertheless, it is a pleasure to announce that although I failed to note the number of messages in the spam folder before I reviewed them and purged it today, the false positive ratio to however many messages remained since my last perusal (no date) was 0.0%.
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