3, 2, 1…Let The Gmail SPAM Awards Blast Off!
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Gmail has by far the best SPAM filter that ever existed. Talking from personal experience, Gmail never generated a “false positive“, in other words Gmail has never marked as SPAM an email that shouldn’t have been. On the other hand, I receive from time to time “false negatives”, meaning that Gmail lets sometimes some SPAM show in my inbox as legitimate emails.
Gmail lets you mark SPAM to learn and make the SPAM filter better at recognizing junk mail. Still as mentioned above, the filter is not perfect enough, and has some flaws.
I am conducting this experiment to evaluate how effective and accurate the Gmail filter is to massive SPAM.
While this test spreads out in the Internet, there will be daily updates in this post, the final analysis will be published once the email box is filled.
The method for conducting this experiment successfully is to mention and link (mailto:) the below email address anywhere it can be picked up (blogs, forums, bulk email lists, etc…)
The 1st 10 people who generate the most SPAM will be included in the final analysis work. For this, just add ‘+YouName‘ or ‘+YourBlogName‘ to the below email address. (e.g. spamawards+googlemilk@gmail…)
For the record, the SPAM bots, and the Nigerians, the famous Gmail address is:
Thank you for your participation!
Update: I've discovered another project similar to mine run by Nik called Googols of SPAM. I am curious to see if our results will be similar as well 
I was trying this experiment too, I called the project ‘Googols of Spam’. It’s at googolsofspam.googlepages.com
Maybe we can share results?
I’d love to!
Let’s just wait a bit and see how well this one spreads out ;-p
I need more spam as well.
I think of it the other way around – “false positive” indicates to me that a mail has been erroneously determined to be spam, and thus the term “critical false positive”, ie, an email upon which timely delivery is depended that is tagged as spam and not delivered.
I have received only received a single false positive – when my ‘blog was hit with a large number of spam comments, my gmail received a large number of “verify this comment” notifications, and one of these was marked as spam. The rest were delivered cleanly to my inbox.
I have been regularly receiving false negatives – specifically of the random text with attached images of varying sizes that form the message to be delivered.
I often get spam on GMail. While I agree, yes, they probably have the best one out there on the net, it’s no where near perfect yet. I’m continuely still clearing out spam every morning that get through to my inbox.
Funny, but just yesterday for the first time I received two e-mails from a friend that went in to the spam box (from a legit ID). Wonder why?
I totally redid my Googols of Spam site, and added a link to your project as well.
bene is right, its the other way around
@ bene and Me, you guys caught my dyslexia!
You’re right, it should have been the other way around.
Fixed thanks!
@Sunil, you know what, Gmail just generated my first “false positive”. It concerns an Amazon affiliate program email. I don’t remember marking it as SPAM, still it’s weird.
@Nick, thanks for the link. We should probably join forces !! I’ve mentioned your site as well.
Wouldn’t email address harvesters strip the plus variable in foo+variable@bar.com? I would also guess they would find addresses with “spam” in their username to be less desirable to sell as well.
Many spam advertisers are idiots. Customers of spammers are even bigger idiots. I’m not sure email harvesters and the covert relay installers are idiots though. Their tools are very sophisticated and they seem to be good at making address lists for profit. Just some food for thought that might affect your contest results.
>> Wouldn’t email address harvesters strip the plus variable in foo+variable@bar.com?
Yes they would, the whole purpose of this research is not to get mentioned among the top 10 who generated the most SPAM, that’s just an incentive.
>>I would also guess they would find addresses with “spam” in their username to be less desirable to sell as well.
I don’t think they sell emails per unit, or look manually at an email address to see if it appeals to them. Any address is good for these folks even if it doesn’t exist.
@Hakim Bennis, I’d love to join forces
Hello, guys. I’m conducting the same experiment for another spam filter not of google. I was wondering where to get spam emails… Can anyone help?