I decided to test Google’s new feature that allows you to collect your POP3 mail with Gmail.

The spam filtering of Gmail is second to none, and works perfectly on all my Gmail accounts, so its a no brainer to give it a try; not only would you get superior spam filtering when you collect your POP3 email with Gmail, but you also get SSL connections thrown in so that you can retrieve your email securely with your laptop when you are out and about.

At least thats the theory.

After setting it all up, I noticed that spam filtering is very broken when you collect your POP3 email with gmail. It lets through anything and everything, including spam with the word ‘viagra’ in the subject.

Take a look at this screengrab for an example of how horribly wrong it is.

As you can see, there are 624 messages in the spam folder, so it is partially working, but in my other Gmail accounts, the messages that have made it into this inbox do not appear.

You can also see that some of the messages have ‘PENIS’ and ‘Cialis’ in the subject. Egads. That is insane. Even Baysian filtering in Thunderbird picks that crap up.

I sent Google a report. No news yet.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 19th, 2007 at 11:24 pm and is filed under Geekn, Oops.