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Comment by Will_Do | Hacker News Reader

I'm beginning to think that we should have two different spam filters.

One that is with p > .995 spam for all the viagra pills and lasik and everything.

Another should be for the emails that are probably spam but not certainly.

For the record, I just went over the 151 spam messages I've received over the past 2 weeks and had 0 false positives. That's pretty good.

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I regularly get numerous false positives every month. Have been for over a year, so I don't see this as an extremely recent phenomenon.

These false positives include messages from Google services and from my work email (which is in my contacts).

It's a little strange. Some false positives are very understandable. A lot are just ridiculous. I'd gladly lower the sensitivity of the filter if Gmail allowed it.

And I went over the 300 spam messages from the last month and found 6 false positives. None were important, but one could have been.

I go in every month or so to retrieve a handful of legit messages and mark them as not spam. Today I had about 50 things in my spam, about ten of which didn't belong. Most were things I don't really care about, like LinkedIn invites to: some email address other than my main one, and some mailing lists I've subscribed to, but still this is bad and getting worse.

On a side note, about 20% of my actual spam over the last few months purports to be from young women named "Jessica," though it's not clear that I'm supposed to believe that it's coming from the same person. Is this just a go-to name for spam pretending to be from friendly (young female) strangers?

Using female names (especially "attractive" names like Jessica, Tiffany, etc.) is an old trick. Males will generally be more receptive to opening an email with a name like this in the from field.

Yeah I get that. They they wouldn't do it if it didn't work, though I'm not sure quite who falls for this. In any case, I'm just amused that mine are so heavy on the Jessica.

Kind of talking to myself here, but thought it was worth noting that "Jessica" was the top female baby name of the decade for both the 80s and 90s: http://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/decades/

True, or just have a setting in Gmail to choose how aggressive you want the spam filter to be.

I don't use gmail, and that's how I've set up procmail custom filters with spamassassin for nearly the past decade.

The nearly certain spam is delivered to /dev/null. The very likely spam is delivered to Junk.

Two folders?

Spam For Sure

Spam Maybe

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