I've seen quite a few people complain about false positives in Gmail (i.e. wanted mail being flagged as spam) but I've never really had a problem with it. However, I'm seeing this happen more and more in my Google Apps account. Granted, many of the emails that are incorrectly flagged as spam are newsletters which I've requested, and I've marked previous editions as "Not Spam" too, but they still get caught by the spam filter.

Also, since I forward all mail to another account I never receive anything that's been automatically flagged as spam in that account.

Who thinks Google should make the spam filter configurable? Even if it's only ON or OFF rather than some complicated filtering rules? I don't get that much spam, so I could easily handle filtering it all myself...

I complain about false negatives. My Gmail looks more like Yahoo Mail from a month ago, while Yahoo Mail has been improving a lot.

Regarding your problem, I think Gmail should let you define a personal whitelist that doesn't interfere with their global algos.

"newsletters which I've requested, and I've marked previous editions as "Not Spam" too, but they still get caught by the spam filter."

Is this not a flaw in the Algo' that is running ?? I mean you are creating a white-list for yourself..so therefore it should abide by decisions made by user.

Maybe their algo run against "their" blacklist before it runs against the meta white-list provided by the user.. .. its an inverse running issue..where precedence is given to the global list rather then promoting a users list

And this morning I see that Google's just flagged its own Google Alert email as Spam in my Gmail account...

I agree with Ionut, I see several false negatives (however Yahoo still remains the same for me).

A bit OT but as far as I am concerned I would like to have an option to never mark as unread by default notification in my spam box. This is really annoying to log in my account and see that I have 50 spam messages in my spam folder...
I can manually go there and check them out to see if there are false positives in it

Why can't they make it so that I nothing coming from an email address I previously replied to will be flagged as spam? That should be obvious, and in rare cases where someone's reply-to is starting to send spam, they could still allow me to flag it (and then adjust their filter).

Playing with filter spams wasted too many time. Maybe this way help:

1. register different email address for different using. For example, for factories, register a one, for cusomer, register a one. For interesting, register a one. Only make your interesting email to be full public.

2.Change the email address if you find spam at your work email. Just a notice to everyone enough, then go to the next new email. Spammer crazy, one of my work email at Yahoo.com got 65535 emails after a long period.

3.At interesting emaill address, if I have enough time, you can also read spams. Only keep valueable email and delete the left at once.

I would like the ability to set up a filtering rule so that anything matching the rule is _not_ marked as spam. Then I could ensure that messages from some news groups, which always have predictable subject lines but unpredictable from-addresses, wouldn't end up in the spam folder.

Google, are you listening?

Google, do you really think ALL people who start their mail with "Dear, My name is...." and speak about bank or viagr_a are my friends???

I just checked my mails of this afternoon: 6 new messages in inbox, 4 spams...

I get a lot of lottery spam. In my inbox.

Google yesterday marked a reminder from my own google calendar as spam. there must be something wrong (and i was not reminding myself to by vi.agra ..)

On the other hand, i receive email forwards from my company, with that go through a spam filter (with a SPAM: in the subject line). However, google does not let me filter directly to the spam filter. of my approx 1000 spams a week, some 50 are caught by my company filter, but not by google. so it would be nice ...