Gmail is still letting ‘obvious’ spam through, i.e. spam with the word ‘viagra’ in the body or the subject. Here is a screen-grab of the the inbox of the account that I am using for testing. Yuck!

When these messages were subsequently collected with Thunderbird, out of the 86 messages collected from the filtered POP mail, the baysian filtering caught 64 spams, 20 spams were not caught and two emails were legitimate.

On all my Gmail accounts where the email is sent directly to an @gmail.com address, the spam filtering is near flawless and I rarely see a spam message. On this account however, the email is collected from a POP3 account to test wether or not gmail’s world-famous spam filtering can be used to eliminate spam from a dirty POP account.

Amazingly, Gmail is failing to catch spam that Thunderbird’s baysian filtering picks up easily; what can we infer about how Gmail’s spam filtering works by this? There are 1397 spams that Gmail has caught from this POP gathered mail, so it is working on some level…very interesting!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 at 10:50 am and is filed under Geekn, wtf?.