It's a great reminder of how good this feature is that we take for granted. I think this outage has actually improved my appreciation for Gmail (a service I normally only complain about).

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sbrother 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Seriously. I didn't even realize this was a wide issue, but I couldn't find a school enrolment email I was looking for this morning, and found it in the spam folder. The fact that I basically never have to do this is actually amazing.

	▲	p-e-w 5 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		They probably have a trillion emails with human labels, either from users directly applying them, or inferrable from actions like deleting. With that much data, even a simple Bayesian classifier should work pretty much perfectly.
	▲	Marsymars 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I wonder about difference in experience that different people have with gmail’s spam filter. In my case, the majority of emails that go to my gmail spam folder are legitimate. I don’t actually receive much spam, a single-digit number of emails per month (in the past 30 days, 2 emails), so any time I see anything in my spam folder I have to check so that I can rescue the email if legitimate.

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samrus 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah i have fantasies of having my own email server and stuff but the spam detection is probably the 3rd thing that would have me crawling back

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chr15m 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I have run my own mail server for years and I rarely see spam. I'm running a classic Bayesian filter as outlined in the legendary PG post "A Plan For Spam" and it works very well. I don't really get all the fuss about this issue. When I do see a piece of unclassified spam I simply classify it and continue. For me this is a far better tradeoff than having all my most private mail on some bigcorp server where any nerd can rifle through it.

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smt88 an hour ago | parent [-]

> For me this is a far better tradeoff than having all my most private mail on some bigcorp server where any nerd can rifle through it.

You've functionally given yourself very little extra privacy because the vast majority of emails you send or receive will still cross through BigCorp servers (whether Google, Microsoft, Intuit, or other).

You can do the work to run your own mail server, but so few other people do that one end of the conversation is still almost always feeding a corporation's data lake.

	▲	wizzwizz4 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		And yet, if you're communicating with someone else who does the same (or uses a niche hosted provider), that entire conversation is outside their "data lake".

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subscribed 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm running my own mail server for longer than I'd like to admit, but not for my critical/key email addresses. Looking at the spam filtering I get in Gmail and knowing my endless fights with spamassassin and DSBLs I know I could never achieve that.

The only upside of having an actual mail server is the ability to say "this is incorrect, no one ever tried to send an email to this address/from this IP" or custom 55x messages.