Skip to main content

Quickly Filter Legitimate E-Mails from GMail Spam Folder

GMail is much better than Hotmail or Yahoo! at filtering spam email but the system is still far from perfect. As GMail users, we do encounter situations when a legitimate e-mail message from a friend or a client is incorrectly tagged as spam by GMail (known as false positive).

Infact, a NYTimes story suggested that the false-positive filtering rate of GMail is around 3% which means that every 3 emails (out of 100) tagged as spam by Google Mail may be from your friends, family or other contacts.

GMail Spam
The next important question is how to catch these "GMail false positives" when you have tons of email in the Spam folder ? Well, it is not so tough as you may think.

First, turn on the Personal Level Indicators in GMail from the Settings page. When switched ON, these indicators add a single arrow (  ) to messages that have your email in the To or CC field, and a double arrow ( » ) to messages that are sent only to you.

If you 20 or 30 email messages in the Spam folder, these indicators can help you quickly identify messages that were addressed to you. Look at the subject text or the sender's name - if that resembles a known contact, move that message from Spam to Inbox.

The above trick works just perfect for people who receive manageable amount of spam each day.



If your email address is more popular and you get hundreds of spam emails, try a search filter as described below [It is based on a simple theory - unlike friends or business contacts, a spammer is less likely to address you with your real name (or even pet name)]

in:spam to:me your_name

Type the above query in the GMail search box and it will show all spam messages that are addressed to you and have your name either in the subject or in the message body. [Replace your_name with your first name or even your pet name]

You'll get a list of emails that fit the above criteria - apply the same "personal level indicator" rule to visually identify non-spam messages from the search results.

Related: Tricks to hide your email address from spammers

Popular posts from this blog

How to Download Contacts from Facebook To Outlook Address Book

Facebook users are not too pleased with the "walled garden" approach of Facebook. The reason is simple - while you can easily import your Outlook address book and GMail contacts into Facebook, the reverse path is closed. There's no "official" way to export your Facebook friends email addresses or contact phone numbers out as a CSV file so that you can sync the contacts data with Outlook, GMail or your BlackBerry. Some third-party Facebook hacks like "Facebook Sync" (for Mac) and "Facebook Downloader" (for Windows) did allow you to download your Facebook friends' names, emails, mobile phone number and profile photo to the desktop but they were quickly removed for violation of Facebook Terms of Use. How to Download Contacts from Facebook There are still some options to take Friends data outside the walls of Facebook wall. Facebook offers the Takeout option allowing you to download all Facebook data locally to the disk (include

PhishTank Detects Phishing Websites by Digg Style Voting

OpenDNS, a free service that helps anyone surf the Internet faster with a simple DNS tweak , will announce PhishTank today. PhishTank is a free public database of phishing URLs where anyone can submit their phishes via email or through the website. The submissions are verified by the other community members who then vote for the suspected site. This is such a neat idea as sites can be categorized just based on user feedback without even having to manually verify each and every submission. PhishTank employs the "feedback loop" mechanism where users will be kept updated with the status' of the phish they submit either via email alerts or a personal RSS feed . Naturally, once the PhishTank databases grows, other sites can harness the data using open APIs which will remain free. OpenDNS would also use this data to improve their existing phishing detection algorithms which are already very impressive and efficient. PhishTank | PhishTank Blog [Thanks Allison] Related: Google

Digital Inspiration

Digital Inspiration is a popular tech blog by  Amit Agarwal . Our popular Google Scripts include  Gmail Mail Merge  (send personalized emails with Gmail ),  Document Studio (generate PDFs from Google Forms ) and   File Upload Forms ( receive files  in Google Drive). Also see  Reverse Image Mobile Search , Online Speech Recognition and Website Screenshots , the most useful websites on the Internet.