Sudden upserge in spam?

[starwiz]

I noticed just today--a few hours ago, really--a tremendous upsurge in
unfiltered spam to my gmail account. I normally get plenty of spam,
but now it's all getting past the spam filter!

Has anyone else experienced this problem? I have difficulty
understanding why Gmail's spam filter would just stop working.

-Starwiz

[asphyx]

I have another problem concerning spam: I have no more, no less, spam in my Inbox or in my "Spam" folder, but Gmail is sorting mail from "Google Groups" as spam ... Especially the digest.

Something is broken =)

http://asphyx0r.deviantart.com
http://www.coolminiornot.com/browse/submitter/asphyx

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GCS d-- s+:++ a-- C++++ UL++ P++ L++ E---- W++ N+++ o-- K---- w++
O- M+ V-- PS+++ PE++ Y+ PGP+ t+ 5+ X+++ R+++ tv+ b+ DI- D++
G e+ h! r++ y*
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

[d@ni]

I agree that there is an upsurge of spam, most of the spam used to be
caught before it arrived in my inbox, but now it sits right there for
me to see. I cant understand why its not possible to have an acceptable
user address so that only address we recognise, we can receive mail
from and all the others deleted. Its got a huge email capacity so the
spammers are just absolutely loving it. I have bigfoot, btinternet,
hotmail and dont have this spam problem.

[Aric Warsaw]

You can bet that the GMail spam filter uses some form of an AI language to identify and flag potential messages for spam.  I have no inside information nor do I work for Google, but I would take a guess and say that it's probably bayesian belief as this approach is used for many spam filters.  Google may have used something else...they tend to do things differently.

What you need to know is that the spam filters on all GMail accounts are going to start at some initial value or values...probably all 0's.  As you send and receive mail these values will change depending on the content of the messages.  Essentially, GMail is learning from the type of emails you are getting.  It's possible that an upsurge of spam is not something your specific spam filter really knows how to handle, and is allowing them to go to the inbox.  The best thing for you to do is to mark them spam until your account normalizes.  I had to do this for a long time before the account was really tuned.  I used to never get google group stuff in my spam filter, but in the last 5 weeks some of those were posts that didn't need to be there and actually were spam, and I marked them spam.  Now I get a couple legit google group messages in there.  I'll just have to train the filter. 

As for the surge in spam, there are a number of things Google has no way to control....spam being one of them.  It's possible that you were sent a mass email and one of those individuals had some malicious ware on their machine which has now dumped your email into the the "ring of spam" as I like to call it.  You own machine may be infected or some system out there that you know and trust has been compromised in such a fashion that now all email addresses found in the compromise are being heavily spammed.  Maybe a Botmaster is getting ready to get caught somewhere and is just living it up.  It's hard to say.  It goes through dry and wet spells.

[s']

I am getting more spam too, and it is listed as [junk] so I know it is
spam so it is easy to report but still a pain...

[APB]

My experience has been that although usually the spam filtering is very good, every once in a while a bunch of such messages will get through. I report them as spam, and it doesn't happen again for several weeks. I've just figured that every once in a while there's a little glitch in the system. I can live with it; overall, the spam reduction and low number of false positives is far better than anything else I've used. In fact, it's so rare for spam to get into my non-spam mail that they stick out and are easily reported.

[MyGoodFriend]

My experience has been similar to APB's. I've had gmail for about
5 months now. The spam filtering was good right from the start
(no "start from zero"). However, over the last several weeks an
unusually high percentage of spam got thru (about 1/2). I dutifully
mark them as spam. It has been back to normal for the last few
days.

[greenhatch]

I find the Spam filtering works well on the whole. I'm lumbered with
about 100 a day and 95% usually gets filtered out ok. That drops to
85-90% at times. My main beef is the auto delete does not work and has
never worked since I opened the account over a year ago.