There's a lot of buzz right now around the Ultra-managed inbox and subscriber activity tracking, when it comes to reading emails. Everything to establish the relationship between a particular email recipient and a particular sender and make correct filtering decisions.
In his last post Dela Quist has pointed out that "inbox delivery based on behaviour will significantly increase the false positives".
Being a long time user of email I'm not very optimistic about automation, when it comes to classifying my emails. So my Gmail account is not yet running the "Priority Inbox".
However in the long run I've noticed that Gmail puts a lot of emails that I don't read that often into my spam folder and I have to browse it more and more as false positives are more and more common.
The example shown at the screenshot below is something that has triggered me to write this article and share this with you as behavior based filtering is already here.
What you can see here is my spam folder that shows 2 daily agendas from my own Google Calendar that were filtered as spam. These notifications come every morning and include my daily agenda. They come from my Google Calendar that works at the same email address as the mailbox that they end up at.
I thought to myself… Why would they think it's Spam?
Content? I checked it. Nothing out of the ordinary in there. No viagra, no enlargement or watches.
The only routine I follow is that I delete these emails from my mailbox after reading them. Maybe I'm getting paranoid, but if Google is getting their own, transactional messages filtered, then how can a commercial sender get through?
Maybe it's time to measure mailbox quality by the number of false positives instead of showing the percentage of spam that's being blocked? This still seems to be a competitive edge on Gmail's homepage. Nobody cares about that anymore… People want to get their important emails landing in the inbox rather than wasting time on checking the spam folder for legit emails. Unfortunately the latter is something that is taking more and more of my time.
I love Gmail,but eventually I guess the one with the least false positives will be the winner. Hopefully I won't have to migrate anywhere with my private mailbox
Last 5 posts by Krzysztof Jarecki
- Spam on Twitter - December 3rd, 2008
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- Some Yahoo findings - Let's compare approaches - September 13th, 2008
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It would be a mistake to conclude that no one cares about how much spam is being blocked because "no one is talking about it".
If Gmail's ability to staunch the flow of spam wavered, there'd be plenty of talk. And people would still have to fish their mail out from all the junk, except the junk folder would just be the inbox.
I've had Google put Google Calendar notifications in my GMail spam folder a few years ago already. Noticiations that didn't look spammy at all (in one case it was for a recurrent 'event'). AFAICR It hasn't done it since though. I know Google Calendar can be used by spammers (and probably has been), but it should know I added this event itself.
It is kind of sweet Google doesn't advantage itself though. Something that is confirmed by a Google search for search engine.
Yes. If Google is routing mail that is often deleted unread – even mail originating from other Google domains – then it sounds to me like the "engagement filter" is working precisely as designed.
And, of course, one always has the option of designating the message as "Not Spam" in the interface.
In order for this "deliverabiity by engagement" to work – it means that Google has to be tracking individual user behavior. That literally means they know that I open every Bank of America email and disregard every Expedia e-mail.
That just seems like a HUGE invasion of privacy.
But wait wait wait, the account is free, and when we sign up for it, it's all in the T&Cs………………….spare me!