This post Survey: People really do click on spam ads really got me thinking about a few things. First, my history.

Back in some year, let’s say 1998 or maybe 1997 I got my first portal email address (had an aol address and a college address before that). It was tommy_unger@yahoo.com . Yes, I’m putting the email right out there for all of the bots to parse, and I expect the spam onslaught continue. The address is absolutely worthless because it is 99% spam! Much of it in foreign languages (arabic or persian or something from that part of the world seems popular these days. Then of course there’s the cryptic meaningless text, or just “Hi, come to my website so we can have sexy time”. My 8 month old son could probably detect spam better than Yahoo’s algorithms.

Then, finally, came gmail. I signed up with a better address. Same name as above without the underscore, and low-and-behold, I see about one spam message a month. I remember seeign a video a few years back about gmail’s spam detection and it seems right on the money. What I also like is that gmail also rarely(maybe never) has the false positive case where they dump an important message into the spam bucket.

So, back to the article I began with… It mentions:

few users ever click the “report as spam” button on their email client; most just delete spam messages as they arrive (and fail to help train their spam filters in the process)

I’ve got a hunch that gmail has higher rates of this “report as spam” click than the other email clients. I also have a feeling that yahoo mail’s “report as spam” button is just a black hole that ever gets used to clean up anyone’s spam.

Combine gmail’s possible higher “report as spam” click rate with a probable much better algorithm and/or system and you get a much nicer web mail experience in my opinion. So, thanks yahoo tech blog (you still do content well, of course), for reminding me why I love gmail.