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Better than GMail?
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Sunday, July 30, 2006
I have to confess a dirty little secret here: I've been using GMail for my personal mail for a couple of years now. I have one of those accounts that dates back to the days when you had to know someone to get in, and everyone got only a few invites to hand out.
GMail's spam filtering has always been top-notch. Every once in a blue moon I'd get a false positive (probably 10 messages over 2 years), but it never missed an actual piece of spam. My inbox remained blissfully spam-free all this time.
Until now, that is. For the past few weeks, it seems every time I check my mail there, I have at least one piece of spam -- sometimes well-disguised, but sometimes blatantly obvious -- in my inbox. I don't know what's gone wrong, but it just isn't working the way it used to. It's still not bad, but it's disappointing that GMail's near-100% success rate is faltering.
Meanwhile, the spam filtering on my AOL account has been incredible. A few years ago, when I was using an AOL account for my personal mail, spam blocking seemed to have about a 50% success rate at best. I spent a lot of time in my inbox with AOL Communicator selecting messages and clicking on the "Report Spam" button. But lately, AOL's filters have been batting 1000. I have not seen a single piece of spam hit my inbox, though I've seen plenty of the stuff wind up in the spam folder where it belongs. And early on there were a couple of false positives, but I only had to tell the system about these messages once, and since then messages from the same senders and with the same or similar content have not been filtered. This is no doubt due to how the AOL mail system populates your address book from messages you tell it are not spam, which it then uses as a whitelist.
I'm not giving up on GMail just yet, but if this trend continues I think I'll be switching my personal mail over to a free AIM mail account. Or maybe I'll ressurect the SN I haven't been using in a long time. There's hardly a good reason not to, outside of the simple fact that all of my friends and family (plus a ton of web sites and companies I do business with) know me by my GMail address. That's really the only reason these days, and I think that's outstanding.
Point: AOL.
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Better than GMail?
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I have to confess a dirty little secret here: I've been using GMail for my personal mail for a couple of years now. I have one of those accounts that dates back to the days when you had to know someone to get in, and everyone got only a few invites to hand out.
GMail's spam filtering has always been top-notch. Every once in a blue moon I'd get a false positive (probably 10 messages over 2 years), but it never missed an actual piece of spam. My inbox remained blissfully spam-free all this time.
Until now, that is. For the past few weeks, it seems every time I check my mail there, I have at least one piece of spam -- sometimes well-disguised, but sometimes blatantly obvious -- in my inbox. I don't know what's gone wrong, but it just isn't working the way it used to. It's still not bad, but it's disappointing that GMail's near-100% success rate is faltering.
Meanwhile, the spam filtering on my AOL account has been incredible. A few years ago, when I was using an AOL account for my personal mail, spam blocking seemed to have about a 50% success rate at best. I spent a lot of time in my inbox with AOL Communicator selecting messages and clicking on the "Report Spam" button. But lately, AOL's filters have been batting 1000. I have not seen a single piece of spam hit my inbox, though I've seen plenty of the stuff wind up in the spam folder where it belongs. And early on there were a couple of false positives, but I only had to tell the system about these messages once, and since then messages from the same senders and with the same or similar content have not been filtered. This is no doubt due to how the AOL mail system populates your address book from messages you tell it are not spam, which it then uses as a whitelist.
I'm not giving up on GMail just yet, but if this trend continues I think I'll be switching my personal mail over to a free AIM mail account. Or maybe I'll ressurect the SN I haven't been using in a long time. There's hardly a good reason not to, outside of the simple fact that all of my friends and family (plus a ton of web sites and companies I do business with) know me by my GMail address. That's really the only reason these days, and I think that's outstanding.
Point: AOL.
kocik01 at 10:31:00 AM EDT Blog about this entry |
Add to del.icio.us | digg this
