My GMail Spam Stats
This is a page I’ve created to keep track of my spam stats on GMail since I switched over all my RyanWaddell.com email. Let’s see how well she works, shall we?
Spam received since Thursday, October 6, 2005: 3807
Uncaught Spam: 806
78.8% final efficiency, in 2 months, 2 weeks. Truly disappointing. Oh well!
Getting worse as time goes by! It seems like most of the messages squeaking through the cracks are the “hot stock tip” spams. I wonder if this is because tons of people are falling for them, and not marking them as spam? That would be really sad…
Update (October 10, 2005): it appears as though most of my spam is being caught now, so I’m guessing it was a matter of the filters catching up properly… I will still keep updating this until at least November 6, just to get a good baseline of data. But I’ve modified so that I am updating uncaught spam instead of caught spam, because I found that I was constantly updating spam received and caught spam, whereas it’s actually easier to just update spam received and the occasional uncaught spam.
Update (October 19, 2005): Google, you are stinkin up the joint. Seriously. The exact same messages are arriving in droves, all saying MXON MXON MXON, and every one I’ve marked as spam, yet you STILL CAN’T CATCH THEM???
Update (November 11, 2005): Well, Google, Popfile definitely kicks your ass. They’re open source, maybe you should consider using them? My Popfile statistics were, from Jan 6 2004 to October 6 2005, as follows: 481 classification errors out of 25,955 spams received. Your stats: 307 classification errors out of a measly 1333 spams! Not impressive in the slightest.
Update (December 5, 2005): 21% missed spam. After 2 months of training, I am SO not impressed. Google, your spam detection sucks. Today’s “mark it as spam 100 times” spam is “RISING OIL STOCKS!”. The message contents are 100% identical, with just slightly altered message subjects, and Google is missing them without fail. So sad.
Update (December 20, 2005): Ok, I am sick and tired of tracking this. Google had their fair shot at proving to me that they could effectively filter my spam, and failed miserably. So, I turned on filters to the 10 or so mail addresses that would be constantly spammed (most of them were pornsitename at my domain) to just reject those mail addresses entirely (since I don’t use them anyway) and turned on SpamAssassin. As of today, this page is no longer being updated.