Spam is dead, long live Gmail

The best things in life are free and it's all too easy to take them for granted. Especially online apps. Like Gmail. This isn't my first time singing the praises of Google's wonder app and it won't be my last. We're all too ready to criticize and whinge on the blogosphere but slow to give praise where praise is due. Especially to the 'big boys'.

What prompted this outpouring of geeky adulation? The new link to 'videos of our engineers' on the Gmail login screen -

"Gmail Theater presents: Why use Gmail? Because Gmail's got a crack team of engineers who are serious about battling spam. We fight the good fight, day in and day out, no matter how crafty the spammers might get."

Which could sound all so vacuous except that in my experience it's absolutely true. In fact it's so true that I'd actually forgotten about spam. No, really I had. I can't honestly remember the last time I got a spam message in my inbox. And it's not as if I have an obscure address - I 'advertise' it on my blog and any spammer could guess it's composition from my domain.

But the video reminded me that I should probably go look in the Spam folder and make sure I wasn't missing important messages. 207 mails in the last month and guess what? Not a single false positive. 100% accuracy.

Yes indeed, Google have rescued email from the deadpool.

Comments

[Damien B]

I love everything about gmail. The web interface is great, the storage is great, the searching is great. I use both forms of mobile interface (through a mobile browser and the mobile app) regularly. The pop access and forwarding are both strong (although I would fix one or two things there).

But two things are exceptionally good. As you have said, the spam filtering. One of my accounts (first registered in 1996) gets upwards of 1,000 spam per day, but 5-10 legit messages. Apple Mail's spam filtering is good, but gmail is excellent.

The second thing is "Google apps for your domain", which has saved my bacon on a few occasions recently. It's reduced the load on other servers, saved storage space, provided much more flexible interfaces and is very quick and easy to deploy.

Gmail is an outstanding service, and continues to get better. It has totally changed the way I use email, and given me faith that the spammers actually can be beaten before they make email totally unusable.