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Comment by martinced | Hacker News Reader

There was a recent article on HN saying that spam was pretty much a non-issue nowadays to people using mail services with correct spam filtering.

Since I moved to GMail I don't know what spam is anymore: everytime people complain about spam I'm confuzzabled because I honestly thought the issue was solved.

It's great to run your own mailserver and be independant of the evil Google etc. but face the facts: people on GMail hardly get spam anymore...

Now as to how to fight spammers I'd suggest building a gigantic botnet, taking control of hundreds of thousands of credit cards numbers and ordering like mad from these spammers. Make it so big that credit cards companies start noticing the issue.

This of course should be done by someone who doesn't care about petty money...

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I still get spam in my gmail inbox, nowhere near as much as I do to my spam folder but it's still there.

Most of it seems to be of the form "Hi, this is Natalia from the dating site. I loved your photo and would want to speak with you, please reply soon! xxx" rather than "buy v1agr4 4 big dikk http://10.23.133.21/m4dsexcockpillz, so I guess harder to filter.

The more annoying thing with gmail is that most of my inbox is legit mail that was never intended for me. Since the gmail namespace is so cluttered there are a few people who have almost identical email addresses to me; so I get their mail in error often.

Also google seem to have merged my account with someone elses, so I get notifications about stuff that is definitely not mine.

I get a couple a week, and today I got a couple false positives from my bank with my proof-of-payment for a new car (fairly important, basically). I've received hundreds of mails from that same address for many years, opened or forwarded each one, but today it's spam? That seems like a 2004 problem, not 2013.

Luckily I was expecting the mail, and there is a solution. I added a filter for that email address and say "don't mark these messages as spam". But "solved" would mean "spam doesn't exist anymore", in my book.

Nonetheless, I love Gmail and its spam filtering. I'm very happy to mark a few messages as spam for the greater good.

Solved? Not quite.

I too have a gmail address, and I'm getting spam in my inbox on a pretty regular basis (1-2 messages a week). Of course, it's about 1 message missed out of 1000+ spam messages, but that scarcity tends to add legitimacy to the message.

It also means I have to spend more time looking for the problem with potentially legitimate messages.

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