On 2014-07-31 07:39, David F. Skoll wrote:
Gmail's spam filtering is at least as good as stock SpamAssassin, and honestly I think it's better. You can achieve equal quality with SpamAssassin if you're willing to work at it. But it does take a lot of work.
This is the real difference with Gmail -- You don't have to work at it. Gmail controls the client and the server, their spam filtering learns based on how you interact with messages.
They also have some impressive bayes-type categorization which narrows messages into far more specific categories than just a "spam" or "not spam", and it profiles what types of messages you are likely to *want* vs *not want* rather than what is technically spam.
Open messages frequently? Click on multiple links? Those messages, and messages similar to them, are less likely to be spam. Leave something in your mailbox for days/weeks and delete it without reading it? You might not miss it next time.
It's the level of personalization that makes Gmail appear to be so amazing to users, it has an understanding that one message might be spam to you, and not spam to someone else, and it uses your own history to make that decision on freshly received messages.
To me, it's not worth the price as a primary mailbox (privacy, security, control of data, terrible UI usability), but the filtering alone is impressive.
-- Dave Warren http://www.hireahit.com/ http://ca.linkedin.com/in/davejwarren
