Jim Lipsey

GMail does a pretty good job identifying spam. The offending messages are slotted into a ‘Spam’ folder, where they sit for 30 days before being deleted automatically.

If you’re a compulsive person (like me), this produces an obsessive need to check the spam box four or five times a day to look for false positives and delete everything else. In the year I’ve used GMail, the total number of messages incorrectly marked as spam by the sytem has been one, and even it wasn’t very important.

So I spent the last month restraining the urge to check my spam folder at all, simply allowing the number of flagged messages to grow while supressing the fear that something important might be in there. The spam count is now holding steady at 1500*, with the deletion rate roughly equal to that of incoming spam. At some point, I stopped noticing, blissful ignorance saving me about 30 seconds from each day. If your missive gets thrown in there by mistake, I apologize for ignoring it.

And yes, this entry is lame. The boys’ blog has much more interesting happenings.

* For those of you scoring at home, this works out to about 50 pieces of spam a day.