There's a lot of buzz right now around the Ultra-managed inbox and subscriber activity tracking, when it comes to reading emails. Everything to establish the relationship between a particular email recipient and a particular sender and make correct filtering decisions.
In his last post Dela Quist has pointed out that "inbox delivery based on behaviour will significantly increase the false positives".
Being a long time user of email I'm not very optimistic about automation, when it comes to classifying my emails. So my Gmail account is not yet running the "Priority Inbox".
However in the long run I've noticed that Gmail puts a lot of emails that I don't read that often into my spam folder and I have to browse it more and more as false positives are more and more common.
The example shown at the screenshot below is something that has triggered me to write this article and share this with you as behavior based filtering is already here.
What you can see here is my spam folder that shows 2 daily agendas from my own Google Calendar that were filtered as spam. These notifications come every morning and include my daily agenda. They come from my Google Calendar that works at the same email address as the mailbox that they end up at.
I thought to myself… Why would they think it's Spam?
Content? I checked it. Nothing out of the ordinary in there. No viagra, no enlargement or watches.
The only routine I follow is that I delete these emails from my mailbox after reading them. Maybe I'm getting paranoid, but if Google is getting their own, transactional messages filtered, then how can a commercial sender get through?
Maybe it's time to measure mailbox quality by the number of false positives instead of showing the percentage of spam that's being blocked? This still seems to be a competitive edge on Gmail's homepage. Nobody cares about that anymore… People want to get their important emails landing in the inbox rather than wasting time on checking the spam folder for legit emails. Unfortunately the latter is something that is taking more and more of my time.
I love Gmail,but eventually I guess the one with the least false positives will be the winner. Hopefully I won't have to migrate anywhere with my private mailbox
