Dear Google Mail Team - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/DiG9qANf5PA <comment><USER3> I could see 20% false positives on spam for Linus equating to 0.1% of false positives across the board since I suspect the people emailing Linus are 200 times more likely to be running their own mail server than the general public.

<comment><USER4> I decided to do a quick check of my gmail; there were 151 emails in spam, and literally not one I would want in my inbox.

It seems entirely likely that Google is weighting whether something comes from a private mail server very heavily, and Linus, being who he is, gets a lot of email from private servers.

Not saying this isn't a problem, but it probably doesn't affect 99% of email users.

<comment><USER5> Just FYI, most spam does not even reach your spam folder.

<comment><USER6> What happens to it? It gets blackholed somehow?

<comment><USER7> Mail relay servers deny its acceptance.

<comment><USER5> Google can also decide it's not even worth showing in the spam folder - <USER2> spam folder is for things it's less certain of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> very funny, right after I saw this, I decided to check my spam folder just to see if anything important has been filtered out, and I saw an email sent by google marked as a spam:

this email is sent by google when logging in google account from a new machine. they tag their own email as spam ...

Hi xxx, Your Google Account email@example.com was just used to sign in from Chrome on Windows.

Don't recognize this activity? Review your recently used devices now.

Why are we sending this? We take security very seriously and we want to keep you in the loop on important actions in your account. We were unable to determine whether you have used this browser or device with your account before. This can happen when you sign in for the first time on a new computer, phone or browser, when you use your browser's incognito or private browsing mode or clear your cookies, or when somebody else is accessing your account. Best,

The Google Accounts team

<comment><USER9> At least their filters are as impartial as they're inaccurate and overly aggressive...

<comment><USER10> I wonder how that'd work in an anti-trust case?

"Your honor, clearly you can see that our services are so impartial as to _flag our own email_..."

Something tells me that probably wouldn't work.

<comment><USER11> If yahoo sued them? I don't see why it wouldn't. It may not convince an expert witness, but why wouldn't it convince a jury?

<comment><USER10> Yeah, good point. I guess I was feeling unnecessarily cynical.

If _I_ were on the jury, I'd definitely buy it. Their counsel would have to really bone up the argument that it was such equal treatment, they were flagging their own messages. And the prosecution would have to really stretch things, probably entering into conspiratorial territory in order to make a case.

Then again, I've found myself perplexed by jury decisions on tech-related cases more than once. Although having sat on a jury, I can see how such decisions might be made.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I run my own mail server with full SPF, DKIM and SRS, routing the mail through a relay at a reputable VPS provider on high-reputation IPs. Over the last few months, there seems to be this pattern where if I email someone @gmail who I've never mailed before, they don't seem to ever get it. I wonder if this is the issue.

<comment><USER13> This is one of the reasons I use Google Apps for Business for email (that and I find running mail servers tedious) as deliverability is consistently simpler.

<comment><USER14> Having to use a Google product instead of your own mail server, in order to have your email delivered to Google customers, sounds like anti-competitive business practices to me. You'd think they'd be a wee bit more careful with something like that given EU interest in them...

<comment><USER15> It also isn't enough. Some of our gmail users' email (sent through the gmail smtp server with oauth) will be marked as spam in gmail. Very frustrating!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm kind of surprised that Linus uses Gmail.

It's likely that he'll actually catch a Googler's attention, but for many of us, user feedback is not an option.

@jacquesm's [http://jacquesmattheij.com/ham-or-spam-gmail-not-to-be- trust...](http://jacquesmattheij.com/ham-or-spam-gmail-not-to-be-trusted-for- important-mail) is another recent instance — but again, there's no call to action.

Gmail is great for some people, but I prefer having more control, and I highly recommend [https://FastMail.com](https://FastMail.com) if Gmail is failing to meet your needs.

<comment><USER17> Linux Foundation uses Google Apps for Work.

Source: I am an LF employee.

<comment><USER18> does the linux foundation have offices?

<comment><USER17> 100% virtual. We have labs and a couple of the projects we support have offices, but no office like you're thinking.

<comment><USER18> why?

how do you got a work there?

<comment><USER17> why what? why no offices? keeps overhead lower, we like working from home, who is going to tell Linus to show up at an office every day?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've had a problem with false positives in my spam folder for months. A large percentage of the email newsletters I subscribe to end up in my spam folder every day, and clicking Notspam doesn't help. I can Notspam a certain newsletter every day for a week, and then the next day that same newsletter will end up in my Spam folder once again.

I'm starting to think that Notspam signals have no effect at an individual level. Either that or the button is simply a placebo.

Fortunately, the false positives for personal correspondence from individuals are still extremely rare, at least for me.

<comment><USER20> Yep, Gmail's spam filters work based on the collective judgment of Gmail users. The core of your and linus' problem is a lot of people use the 'mark as spam' button as unsubscribe button for mailing lists.

<comment><USER21> _based on the collective judgment of Gmail users_

I find this trend of "follow the majority" quite disturbing - it's as if they're implicitly saying that everyone should think the same way and punishing those who don't follow. What's spam to me may not be spam to you, and vice-versa.

Then again, having a personalised spam filter for each user would probably consume a huge amount of resources...

<comment><USER22> Not sure why you are down-voted. Perhaps because everyone (that run their own mail) generally runs individual filtering per account. Typically spam assassin will score an email, but filtering (based on that, and other criteria) is up to the individual user (eg: by having a white-list, choosing spam score to treat as spam etc).

As mentioned further up, some scoring works well for many users, but _not_ for all, such as marking eg: Russian/Chinese/Not-spoken-here-by-most language as spam.

I really see no reason for why Google should be so bad at classifying email as they apparently are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Happened to me as well. Some of the eMail were just "updates" email that I like to receive but if they get lost is not a big deal. But a couple of them were very important one, and to make things worst, they were answer to email in which I was in CC. So, a colleague of mine send an email to someone and CC me. The second person answer and that mail is marked spam for me but not for the person who wrote the original eMail. Doesn't make sense that an answer to a legitimate conversation is by default a legitimate eMail?

<comment><USER22> Thankfully there's Hangouts, so we can all move off email... /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> How much of this is caused by people marking mailing list emails as SPAM instead of properly unsubscribing?

<comment><USER25> I don't blame them when the Unsubscribe link is buried at the bottom of a 8MB marketing newsletter in 4px font.

<comment><USER26> Or when you need to log in again to unsubscribe

<comment><USER27> Which is illegal in the US[1] (and I believe EU, as well), and hence deserves to be reported as spam.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4496688](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4496688)

<comment><USER28> A big problem I've had is that many of these are "business relationship/transactional" e-mails, which play by different rules.

My address is my first name + last initial (neither of which are all that uncommon), and this is made much worse by Gmails idiotic ignoring of periods in addresses. There is a dude in Denver, CO who is absolutely convinced his e-mail address is firstname.lastname@example.com. It isn't. I'm really sick of getting his AT&T and car insurance e-mails.

<comment><USER29> This happens to me all the time as well. I also have email@example.com and apparently a lot of other people seem to think they do as well. Or at least, they have firstname.lastname@example.com and people easily forget to add the number.

I wish there was a better way to deal with this type of situation other than constantly sending "please fix your address book" emails. Email is a broken system.

<comment><USER22> I'm not sure how you go from: Unless you have Google Apps for Business (or whatever), there are no vanity domains for gmail; to: email is a broken system?

Gmail.com is certainly broken in the sense that they want to cram 10 billion users into a single domain. It's ridiculous marketing/brand-motivated UX failure.

Since forever most mail services had a few vanity-domains, so people could get email@example.com. But no, Google doesn't want to provide email, they want to provide "Google Mail".

Apologies for the rant, but I can't stand it when big companies create problems through stupidity.

<comment><USER29> I dont believe I said anything about vanity domains, so I dont know what you mean by that.

I meant that email is broken in the sense that when some stranger mistakenly thinks that your email belongs to them, and continues to give it out or sign it up for mailing lists, you have absolutely no recourse. If you have an email address that like mine is easily mistaken for other ones you get incorrectly- addressed personal emails many times a day. There is no way to find the actual intended recipient or get in contact with that person to say "hey you seem to be confusd, stop using my email address". And there is no really good way to filter those emails, since after all they are coming to your correct address. I think this is the kind of problem that's difficult to appreciate unless it happens to you frequently.

The problem with email is that anyone can email you if they have your address.. thats why we have so much spam. I dont know what the solution is, but it would be much better if the recipient had to opt-in to the conversation somehow as well.

<comment><USER30> > so I dont know what you mean by that.

I believe he means that if email@example.com was already taken, Google should offer email@example.com rather than email@example.com. In fact they shouldn't even show that as an option.

Since Google Is now a domain registrar they could create the new domains on the fly.

Then there wouldn't be namespace collisions.

<comment><USER22> Indeed. Google/Gmail do two strange things: a) While they support the age old email@example.com in order for users to hand out special addresses to mailinglists etc (eg: firstname.lastname@example.com, firstname.lastname@example.com) -- they _don 't_ distinguish on dots in the username (so username == user.name == u.ser.name etc). And b) they don't offer other domains than gmail.com, which leads to strange things like smith1, smith79 etc.

As for there being "no recourse" \-- apart from spam, that's just wrong. It's _much_ faster to reply with a "This is not _your_ Smith"-mail, than it is to write a "return to sender" on an envelope. Same thing for getting phone calls from a different timezone etc.

[ed: I do agree that it's a bit more difficult with people that don't know their _own_ address -- still think it should be quicker to reach their contacts via email than via comparable means.]

<comment><USER29> >> It's much faster to reply with a "This is not your Smith"-mail

Right, and I've sent literally hundreds of those emails. They almost never do any good, because while one person may fix your address in their contacts list, the original person who gave out the faulty address is still out there, unaware that they're giving out bad info. I always ask if the email sender can tell the intended recipient about this when they figure out the right address, but that rarely works. Anyway, I know this is a very specific problem that only affects a small fraction of people, but it's extremely annoying.

I dont really see how allowing other domains would help.. that just shifts the issue to the domain string instead of the user string. I guess it gives people more options. But one of the main benefits of gmail addresses is that it's so common. Everybody knows it, so nobody ever misspells the 'gmail' part at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> After reading this, I went through my spam folder and it's looking overall quite okay EXCEPT that all the comments on Google+ in response to things I posted these past few weeks are marked as spam. All of them.

Yup: Gmail is marking comments originating from Google+ and written by legitimate users as spam.

</comment><comment><USER32> Wow, just checked my spam folder and there was an important email marked as spam by Gmail. It was from a known contact I had already corresponded with.

<comment><USER33> Every spam filter has false positive. You should make a habit of checking Spam folder periodically, whatever email services you employ (unless you do not enable spam filtering).

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> What would be really fantastic is if Google let you set your own spam threshold. I can't even imagine it would be too difficult. Presumably they determine a numeric 'spam likelihood' number for each incoming email already, so this would just mean being able to customize the threshold that that number is compared against. Obviously entering it numerically wouldn't be very user friendly, but even 5 levels from most to least aggressive (like Spam Assassin and such offer) would be extremely helpful.

Even better would be if you could have different handling for different levels, like black-holing or auto-trashing the absolutely-definitely spam, making it easier to occasionally scan the regular spam box. I get something over 1000 spam emails per day, so it's just not feasible to give even a cursory look over them to find the false positives. I can't even imagine what it would be like for someone like Linus.

Unfortunately, that would draw attention to the fact that the spam filter isn't perfect, and would require users to make choices with tradeoffs, so I can't imagine it's a very attractive option for Google.

</comment><comment><USER35> I am subscribed to the wine-devel, wine-bugs and wine-patches mailing lists ([https://www.winehq.org/forums](https://www.winehq.org/forums)). Having the exact same issue.

It seems to very easily flag _discussion_ about .exes as spam, it's really disappointing. It's been several years and the filters haven't improved, despite me religiously flagging spam/not spam in those lists.

In the end I just gave up and set up filters to specifically prevent marking incoming emails on those lists as spam. It misses the odd linkedin invitation, but it's not like it was catching it before...

<comment><USER36> You are "flagging spam/not spam in those lists" but Google may then associate that list (not the content) as being spam or not. Google sees that mail comes from the list and decides based on that.

This is why I never mark mailing list email as spam, even if it is in fact spam.

<comment><USER35> That's my point. Everything that went to spam, I flagged as "not spam".

<comment><USER36> Yes, but did you ever mark mailing list email as spam? (actual spam even)

If so, maybe gmail thinks "this sender is spammy". That's the mailing list.

<comment><USER35> I don't think I did; but if I did, I'd argue gmail should know better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> He already got a response from the Gmail product manager, must be nice being Linus.

Notice the comments from Sri Somanchi. He's listed as the product manager here: [http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-mail-you-want- not-...](http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-mail-you-want-not-spam-you- dont.html)

</comment><comment><USER38> The unfortunate thing about gmail is its gotten worse than AOL was to deal with on the spam front. I feel like there are historical lessons worth learning regarding where all those @aol.com users went.

1\. Everything became "spam"

2\. They got to a point where they believed they were the standard

3\. Nobody could do anything about it

I can think of many places where this same situation has played out. Its yet to work long term without disastrous results after a reign of technical darkness. That doesn't seem to stop people from thinking it won't happen to them.

Its fine to aggressively fight spam. If you choose to error on the side of false positives then its in your own interest to provide reasonable recourse. If not, you've left a very large gap that somebody else will come in and fill. Just as google did.

</comment><comment><USER39> It might not be related, but I've been seeing some spam in my gmail inbox in the past month. It seems that something has upset the balance. For example, this went to my inbox:

 _From: [...] Baby <[...]firstname.lastname@example.com>

Subject: HELLO HANDSOME

Body: HOW ARE YOU DOING_

<comment><USER40> Interesting, I've been getting very similar spam messages slip into my gmail inbox.

<comment><USER41> Likewise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> A few months ago, I wrote a simple Android app and put it on the Play Store. Now every two weeks I receive unsolicited spammy emails about ad campaigns and increasing user awareness. Funny how those get through the filter.

<comment><USER43> sort of doubly ironic that many other Google service emails that you actually want to receive get filtered...

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> They also started delaying or outright rejecting some mail more aggressively so you don't even get to find it in spam. A few days ago I received a confirmation code from my CA sent to hostmaster@ the next morning after I requested it.

What's even worse they rejected email to postmaster@. I know you can adjust the spam filter sensitivity somewhere in Google Apps but come on, you should not reject any mail to postmaster by default.

</comment><comment><USER45> The real shocker is that Linus Torvalds uses gmail, where you have no control over anything regarding your account (exhibit A: look an awesome new spam filter which you can't turn off!). I would never have thought he'd do that.

<comment><USER46> No. Google Apps for Work.

<comment><USER45> Well same thing, isn't it? Clearly he is forced to use a spamfilter with no opt-in or opt-out.

<comment><USER47> Google Apps has a few more knobs at least: [https://support.google.com/a/answer/2368132?hl=en](https://support.google.com/a/answer/2368132?hl=en)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> "Check your spam folder" is now a default instruction for automated email notifications.

Luckily it's pretty easy to scan the folder for valuable messages.

However, having to do that is clearly not ideal.

Had a wedding RSVP get flagged as spam.

</comment><comment><USER49> FWIW after reading this article, and comments here, I decided to check on the gmail account of a small not-for-profit organization I belong to (I'm the unofficial IT guy). I was shocked, there were 4127 spam messages, and just 98 unread items in the inbox. Slogging through the spam I did find some non-spam mail, but altogether that was <1% of the 4127 spam items.

Of course gmail deletes spam more than 30 days old, so how does it happen than an obscure educational non-profit gets over 4000 spam messages a month? Gmail must be a huge spam magnet, but still a mystery how those messages find their way into _this_ spam bucket. (Unless in the past somebody had abused the account and the email address is on a thousand spammers lists...)

In any case hard to be certain what criteria the spam filter uses to declare a piece to be "spam". Not all the misclassified emails were sent from "private" servers, it would be useful if it was more clearly specified.

<comment><USER50> I've noticed the same thing. Do you by any chance have a catch-all address? That was the major source of spam in the inbox for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Mailing lists are a massive source of false positives for spam. I've pretty much given up on trying to use gmail to subscribe to them.

<comment><USER52> Subscribing to high volume mailing lists from gmail is something I would actually advise against.

I had legitimate emails bouncing because the mailing list had put me over the maximum number of emails that a free Google account can recieve in a day. I didn't even know there was such a limit until I hit it.

I now run my own mail server and have none of these or the other problems outlined here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Google Mail Team, please test all future spam algorithm changes against Linus' inbox.

</comment><comment><USER54> I've been on the other end of this for a few days - basically any company I do business with who has their e-mail on Google simply doesn't get my e-mails. Sometimes I get an active bounce (i.e., a reject due to my originating address), sometimes... Nothing. No pattern, either. Same destination, different behaviors.

The mail simply does not reach my suppliers'/partners' inbox, and as a result we're all losing time and patience with this

The really funny thing? Some of those people I work with are @google.com.

(And yeah, my corporate domain is clean, SPF'd up to the wazoo, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER55> I've been actively interviewing for the past few weeks, and I've noticed that a very large number of emails from companies and recruiters (mostly recruiters) have been marked as Spam or at least shunted off to a non-Inbox folder. I don't have any specific custom filters in place, so this is 100% Gmail's doing. I find that interesting and frustrating -- and none of these companies/recruiters have ever seen this before! Seems like a relatively new phenomenon, at least for these people.

I wonder what Google's internal metrics show...

<comment><USER56> This is mainly due to the fact that so many recruiters have poor practices. I have a rule that if I'm contacted by a recruiter (unsolicited) I politely ask them to remove my details from their database. I label their email as unsubscribed and archive the email in Gmail.

When I get a second email from a recruiter that previously has been marked as unsubscribed then I click that 'mark as spam' button.

I've been doing this for eight years, since I'm quite happy with my work situation and have actively tried to remove myself from their databases over that time. However my CV still seems to be floating around, even though I've also deleted it from every online job portal I was signed up to.

At some point most recruiters need to feel that pain, because they just don't listen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I think even Google should fear the prospects of Linus Torvalds on a mission to "fix email".

</comment><comment><USER58> I'm guilty of this too, but it would really be great if we as a society could develop some impulse against putting all of our eggs in the first shiny basket we see.

</comment><comment><USER59> Been having similar issues as of late. A few very important emails got classified as spam; not nearly 20%, but still enough to compromise my confidence in the system.

</comment><comment><USER60> Linus's 20% is not a false positive rate -- how has nobody caught this? Let's assume that "the 0.1% false positive rate [Google] tried to make such a big deal about last week" _is_ actually a false positive rate by the normal definition.

The false positive rate is defined as (the number of false positives over (false positives + true negatives)). However, Linus quite obviously calculated the 20% as (false positives over positives), i.e. (200 / 1000). If Linus happened to have 200,000 true negatives (i.e., non-spam messages that were not flagged as spam), a number that I'm making up because he did not disclose one, then his false positive rate would be (200 / 200,200) ~= 0.1%.

Think about it... whether his email address was harvested by all the spambots in the world or none at all would have no effect on the fact that out of 200,200 legit messages, 200 were incorrectly flagged. This is why the false positive formula doesn't even include true positives! The 800 true positives (actual spam messages) don't matter to the formula. Therefore, neither does the 1000 total (true+false) positives. Don't divide by it.

</comment><comment><USER61> I've been fighting this for months. I run a simple mail forwarder for our local school PTA (so that president@pta gets to whomever is the current president, etc).

I've enabled every possible thing to make it work (DKIM, SPF, who the hell knows) and mails forwarded to my members with gmail (or Google domain hosted) accounts are always getting the forwarded email in their spam folders.

</comment><comment><USER62> I had to disable spam detection entirely on gmail because I was losing important emails every week. So now I just delete spam by hand.

</comment><comment><USER63> I had a similar issue at some point, where for a month or two, quite obvious "not spam" emails were getting caught in the filter. Nobody else on the internet seemed to be having the issue, and then it suddenly one day stopped happening again. I rarely mark emails as spam/not spam, so I don't think it was anything I did.

</comment><comment><USER64> I looked at my own spam folder, there were 51 messages. ~15 of them were from recruiters and probably meant for me, ~20 of them were newsletters I had probably signed up for, but didn't miss at all and the rest were split evenly for people trying to sell me prescriptions and people trying to use my bank account to hold money. Overall, 50% of the messages were actually FOR me, but it's totally fine that I didn't see them. I'm definitely wondering how many of Linus' messages were actually important enough to not belong in spam. I understand that he probably receives a lot more mail than I do, but I'm wondering how many of those messages he actually missed. Other than the ones that are part of threads he's replied to.

</comment><comment><USER65> Google recently posted "The mail you want, not the spam you don't":

[http://gmailblog.blogspot.de/2015/07/the-mail-you-want- not-s...](http://gmailblog.blogspot.de/2015/07/the-mail-you-want-not-spam-you- dont.html)

<comment><USER66> > We also recognize that not all inboxes are alike. So while your neighbor may > love weekly email newsletters, you may loathe them. With advances in machine > learning, the spam filter can now reflect these individual preferences.

I really wonder how these preferences are reflected if someone hasn't been using spam filters much. I get maybe at most a dozen spam emails escaped a year, and the rest of the emails go through (all mailing lists... I am on a lot of mailing lists) so I get about 50+ emails per day from just DL. So I barely ever need to mark something as spam, or even more something to another folder, so how does Google know what's my preference? It sounds like people who don't actively mark spams are less likely affected...

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> The false positives with GMail really sucks. Case in point literally all Microsoft emails relating to billing on some of my products simply go the spam (my credit card recently updated and I forgot to update it everywhere). So thanks to this post I noticed and can go fix it!

</comment><comment><USER68> Checked all my spam boxes on my various gmail accounts, seems nothing bad has happened with mine.

At least they're nowhere near as bad as Outlook. I have one of my domains on their free Live Domains (grandfathered plan, can't get it for free anymore, similar to google apps) - and 90% of my emails end up in spam, even if they're from a reputable company with sane mail setups such as Digital Ocean, Github or even Google.

To make it worse, with Outlook you can't turn off the spam filter, and it's known that Microsoft sometimes SILENTLY drops emails for various reasons so they never even make it to your spam box...

Sadly I've yet to find any decent replacement mail service for my domains that's free (or very cheap) and of decent quality.

</comment><comment><USER69> How to get a job at Google: add annoying stuff no one asked for, ignore requests users want

<comment><USER70> "Sorry, Maps isn't hiring, but there's an opening in Mail."

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Something like this happened to me recently:

[http://journal.dedasys.com/2015/03/12/alarming-number-of- spa...](http://journal.dedasys.com/2015/03/12/alarming-number-of-spam-false- positives-in-gmail/)

A Googler on HN was kind enough to get in touch with me and help bring the problem to the attention of the right people at Google, who fixed things on their end and made a few suggestions on my end. Presumably, Linus Torvalds will get about 1000x as much Google love as I did.

Good idea to check often though: I just discovered a few LiberWriter customers in my own spam filter... :-/

</comment><comment><USER72> All of the emails my mom sends me are tagged as spam. I have a label that forces them to go to my inbox, but I still get a warning that gmail identified her emails as spam, and there's no clear way of over-riding it.

</comment><comment><USER73> I fear SMTP is going to go the way of RSS at the hands of these giant corps. Closed protocols within machine gun lined walled gardens are the future. Sorry old idealistic computer hipies, we've failed you.

<comment><USER74> What does this have to do with SMTP?

<comment><USER75> I think that the parent is talking about how much power Google has over mail delivery within its own system, which encompasses a larger number of people. If Google decided to switch to a non standard protocol, then smtp'ers would be left high and dry as Microsoft and Yahoo possibly follow suit to maintain an advantage.

Speculation of course but it does point out the problem with Google becoming too big.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Interesting. A few days ago I stopped receiving pull request emails as well. Granted I routinely delete these after I process them - but I was alarmed when I checked my spam and saw them there.

</comment><comment><USER77> I've had the same experience with the LKML lately (been subscribed for about 8 months, generally spam filter has had v. few false positives), can't remember exact numbers, but big, big chunks have been incorrectly labelled.

There seems to be a fair bit of spam sent to the LKML, I don't know whether there's been more lately, but perhaps the large amount of email sent to many people for the LKML and the fact there's a decent amount of real spam sent there, combined with a more aggressive setting is an explanation?

<comment><USER77> Data point: of the 28 messages in my spam folder just now (recently cleared down after picking out real LKML messages), 8 are LKML, though all are legitimately spam atm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> I had an email from a Google recruiter go to the Google spam box. I didn't have the courage to send her the screen shot.

The lesson I learned is we still need to review the spam box once every day or two.

</comment><comment><USER79> I wonder why Linus chose Google+ as his platform for this? Seem's like he has been on a spam crusade lately, going after Github last week: [https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/WHLxTZnjhmz](https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/WHLxTZnjhmz)

I also can't stand when I get added to a repo and start getting messages from every single notification.

<comment><USER80> Linus frequently puts blog posts up on G+, possibly as part of some Google sponsorship deal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> I wrote an article about spam filtering sometime ago. Context was "Spam Filtering should not have any False Positives, ever!".

If anyone is interested they can read it here: [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141202174235-36852258-- spam...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141202174235-36852258-- spamfiltering-xkcd-rocks)

</comment><comment><USER82> Why would Linus be using gmail ?

This is an individual who, in response to broken version control systems _wrote his own version control system_ which he uses, primarily, to control versions of the _operating system kernel that he wrote_.

How is it possible that the above described person is moving his wrist around going clickity-click with a mouse just to read an email ?

<comment><USER83> Gmail actually has pretty good keyboard shortcuts...

<comment><USER82> Even if gmail keyboard shortcuts were anywhere near as good or fast as alpine (they aren't) you still have big bloated responsive AJAX/js pages loading for every single action.

With alpine over ssh I can use email on a bad 2G cellular connection with no hassle at all while google won't even load the inbox.

<comment><USER84> Good point. However, Gmail does let you load an HTML version if you want something less bloated....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> Sadly, this is the typical level of quality for just about all Google products these days in my experience.

</comment><comment><USER86> We've been seeing a huge number of messages sent through Google Groups via our Google Apps domain flagged as spam. I'm not sure what has triggered it lately, but it's almost impossible for us to communicate through our Google Groups email addresses anymore.

</comment><comment><USER87> Gmail spam filter is definitely not working well for me. Obvious spam is considered legit and emails from senders that I constantly report as "not spam" still get into the Junk Mail folder. Outlook.com's spam filter is doing a way better job for me!

</comment><comment><USER88> Every week I usually get about ~200 spams. However last week the number was really high, some ~600. And without checking I deleted all of them. Now I am getting worried, if I deleted any legit email :(

Gmail is not my primary email, but still I do get important emails.

</comment><comment><USER89> Funny, I used to get a ton of false positives in my gmail Spam folder (mailing lists, marketing I subscribed to, forwards from another address) but with the recent changes, I have just 1 false positive of 476 in Spam.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere at Google, some team are looking at Gmail stats and congratulating themselves on how much more "spam" they've blocked with their latest algorithm.

</comment><comment> michel-slm I could concur on the false positives -- I've had to repeatedly salvage mailing list posts marked as spam. Normally from the mailing lists where I lurk and do not actively contribute, but still...

</comment><comment><USER90> All I see in my spam folder is people trying to sell me sex, drugs, credit, and fake Ray-Ban sunglasses. A quick review of 200 spam messages found one false positive from a whitewater rafting company.

</comment><comment><USER91> I get about 600 emails a day because I forward everything* from all my email addresses through a single email account, and I only see 9 spam messages in my spam box, and they are all spam.

</comment><comment><USER92> Just about the only thing that google persistently misclassifies as spam for me are logwatch emails. There must be a large number of people who don't know how to turn them off...

</comment><comment><USER93> lot of variables when it comes with spam detectio ... I guess google has oversimplified some controls, and lot of private server with good reputation are closed outside.

In our company , ( we are a hosting email solution ) lot of time and human resources are spent to monitor and work with the work produced by the spam filters. I guess it is too soon for this kind of solution to be sostituite with AI.

</comment><comment><USER94> Anyone know if Sendgrid or AWS SES is affected? Or even the email marketing shops like MailChimp, Aweber, ExactTarget, etc.

</comment><comment><USER95> No accident. Google controls enough of the worlds email now that can just turn the screws and capture the whole market.

</comment><comment><USER96> Wow 3000 spam threads in just 4 days, how can he find time for actual work if he has so many emails to read/reply!

<comment><USER97> He is a maintainer, reading email is his actual work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> Assumedly my corpus is much lower than his, but I noticed similar things starting some time "this week".

</comment><comment><USER99> I've _always_ had problems with Gmail's spam filter, unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER100> This made me check my own mail box spam and that seems fine so dunno.

</comment><comment><USER101> So it seems this is clearly happening. The question is what to do about it?

1: Switch from gmail. (I've done this - using Fastmail) 2: Increase publicity to drive Google to change 3: It's arguably abuse of monopoly power --> take it to court

</comment><comment><USER102> For some reason I didn't expect Linus to use gmail

</comment><comment><USER103> Someone pointed out last week that signing up for the Google AppStore seemed to unblock their email.

Maybe Google is doing this on purpose to apply pain to people without Google accounts.

</comment><comment><USER104> Spam-detection is pretty much solved, with black-lists and white-list. In some countries it's illegal to send spam, so you can safely add them as white- list's.

</comment><comment><USER105> If they're mostly patches and pull requests, why doesn't this guy just whitelist those email addresses and domains?

<comment><USER35> Because there's a lot of new contributors to the kernel, all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> Runaway DMARC policies perhaps?

</comment><comment><USER74> I guess we'll just go back to manually making filters.

</comment><comment><USER107> I expect that some people mark a message as spam because they personally dislike the sender or because they disagree with them.

Say if Told you that your mother wears Army boots.

</comment><comment><USER69> Gmail is terrible in so many ways - Being randomly locked out of your account, the clunky user-unfriendly interface, the difficulty of marking certain senders as spam, ...</comment>


EuroDjangoConf2009 Keynote All Over Your Twitters - <AUTHOR> http://zedshaw.com/blog/2009-05-04.html

<comment><USER2> What do you know, Zed _is_ so awesome. ;)

This talk does resonate quite a bit with me to be honest. After several years of doing lots of coding FT and working on my own things, it's starting to feel like I'm pigeonholing myself too much, so I've been thinking about going off somewhere and maybe studying something. I'm glad it worked out so well for Zed.

</comment><comment><USER3> All talks are also recorded on video.

<comment><USER4> Where can I get this video?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, I'm already a happy Python programmer, but this made me want to give Django another spin.</comment>


Steve Jobs on how to hire, manage, and lead people [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQKis2Cfpeo <comment><USER3> The young Steve Jobs was fired from the company he founded, because of being unbearable to his team, not to mention internally sabotaging the Lisa team (and contribuing to the failure of the Apple III by very stupid frivolous decisions.) See "folklore.org" for first-hand account.

The initial success of the Apple computer i'd atttribute more to Wozniak for knowing what the hobby computer should be. The original macintosh wasn't a sales success and sales only took off after Steve was fired and the business strategy was reviewed.

The "version 2.0" Steve Jobs that returned to Apple was an improved person, but I simply wouldn't take any advice from the younger SJ.

<comment><USER4> He was fired because he gave up control of his company and for no other reason. Founders don't get fired because employees find them unbearable or sabotaging. Those employees get fired or quit...unless the founder gives up control and then loses an internal political fight.

The sentiment among most early employees was that Steve Jobs was like a good coach: you hated him at the time but look back proudly at what he pushed you to accomplish.

There was no Apple Computers at all without Steve Jobs, and definitely no commercial product like the Apple II. Wozniak had no independent ambition to create a company whatsoever. Wozniak played a vital role but primarily as a perfect catalyst for Jobs.

The Macintosh saved Apple and the foolish "young Steve Jobs" is the _only_ reason it was a great enough product to do that. Jobs did not even have control over pricing or sales of the Macintosh, and so blaming his flawed "business strategy" makes no sense. The people that fired him lived off his work for a decade, and did none of their own work at all.

Yes, Jobs had some growing up to do, and firing him probably did help him do that, but the idea that he was a fool that became great is a total myth. He was always great, as can be seen from the work he did.

<comment><USER5> > He was fired because he gave up control of his company and for no other > reason.

That's not true. The Macintosh in its early years was severely underpowered and expensive, and the Apple II hardware was driving the revenue of the company.

Jobs wanted to shift all the marketing spend onto the Macintosh as well as drop the price to below cost, and caused a crisis with the board of diretors who ended up firing him.

Jobs had the same problem with overambitious hardware at NeXT. They couldn't even sell enough NexT machines to universities and the enterprise because they were still expensive to produce and underpowered, and had to stop making hardware and lay people off.

Moore's Law didn't catch up with the vision until the mid 90s, and luckily he and NexT's operating system were brought back into the fold at Apple then.

<comment><USER6> > Moore's Law didn't catch up with the vision until the mid 90s, and luckily > he and NexT's operating system were brought back into the fold at Apple > then.

This is exactly what people don't understand. Jobs had a dream computer and he was adamant on making it. First time he got fired because of it. Second time he became immensely successful because of the same dream.

This is case of perfect hindsight. It's easy to think he was great because second time around he became crazy successful. Nobody is willing to admit that he was repeating the same strategy and failing at it until luck worked in his favour. His rehiring at Apple when NextStep was failing. And then at Apple he got John Ive and team. And finally evolution of technologies like powerful and efficient processors, touch screens, high density storage etc allowed that dream to be realized finally.

<comment><USER7> He and his company was the first one to bring many great things to the mass market, _because_ he was constantly pushing ahead of his time. NextStep was most of the core of Mac OS X. without NextStep, Mac OS X and the hardware that ran it would have flopped

<comment><USER5> Apple could have bought BeOS, or used their Linux distribution as a base for the next Mac OS: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like his comment at about the 2:06[0] mark where he says "They knew how to manage but they didn't know how to do anything..."

However...a dynamic I see happening in my professional world is that the 'how' of doing things is changing so rapidly that managers aren't able to keep up and so might find themselves in a position where when they first started managing they were an expert in their domain but over time the domain has changed so much that their expertise has fallen behind. At that point I think a manager can still have value by performing classically managerial tasks:

\- setting/reinforcing/communicating the vision (as Jobs notes in the video)

\- recognizing great work by individuals on the team (both within the team and across the org)

\- minimizing uncertainty within their span of control/removing 'blockers'

\- providing autonomy to their staff

\- facilitating collaboration

\- striving for fairness and transparency in management decisions

[0][https://youtu.be/rQKis2Cfpeo?t=2m6s](https://youtu.be/rQKis2Cfpeo?t=2m6s)

<comment><USER9> Ya even at Apple during the end of the Jobs era, Bertrand Serlet, the head of software engineering would go through top and find processes that he thought were using too many threads (instead of lib dispatch) or using too much memory.

At that stage Snow Leopard was already a year behind schedule for what was meant to be a free maintenance + performance release.

So I'd agree that it cuts both ways. A good manager knows to trust his employees.

<comment><USER10> I had a manager recently say not to use a new flask server to host a tiny one client config wizard, but to use the existing one (elsewhere in code base that hosts a customer facing Gui), severely concerned about memory usage.

I feel like sometimes managers create abstractions in their mental model rather than simply relying on their engineers to perform that role at a much greater level of detail. So to this individual, web server == heavy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In every video of Steve Jobs he comes across as one with incredible confidence. I learnt that he dropped out of college and it amazes me to see him exude such confidence. I grew up in India and was constantly told to "shut up and sit down" because I am not qualified yet. I got my bachelor's degree and still feel like I am nothing. Did Steve Jobs get his amazing confidence because of the cultural difference in USA where people are careful not to insult someone. Due to the number of times I have been told to shut up and sit down, I have not gained confidence to speak against power and to lead. I always look at confident people like Steve Jobs with jealousy. May be some of the members of HN can help me here.

<comment><USER12> Yes. Culture plays a big role. The media you consume, the cultural leaders you hear speak, will affect your view of the world. Will you see the world as something malleable that you can change, or accept that you were destined for a low place in an hierarchy and there's nothing you can do to change it.

Ego - narcissism - a desire to prove oneself because of feeling less than others while young - these are the dark and necessary motivators to feeling invincible and confident and that you can make your ideas reality. How arrogant must an entrepreneur be to believe that he can defeat and conquer multibillion industries?

Here's the secret though. There is no secret- there is only your fear of being laughed at and ridiculed and failing. People like Steve Jobs aren't confident because they try to be confident - confidence is a side effect of being stubborn and desperate. You are desperate to succeed because of the dark motivators I described above. You are stubborn because you desire success desperately, and will keep knocking your head against the wall until you achieve it. If you push your stubborn-ness and desperation to the extremes, eventually one day people will look at you speak, and think you were always confident and always powerfully-centered and in control. But they are just seeing the symptoms of a lifetime of failure and desperation and stubbornness that has finally begun to turn around.

What I am saying is - to be confident - be honest with yourself. If you want to be great, expose yourself, look ugly and feel insecure, but be stubborn in pursuing your honest desire to be great and do great things. Confidence will be gained by trying to do exceptional and weird things long enough until you realize you can achieve them.

<comment><USER11> Thank you, Richard!

<comment><USER13> [https://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Winning-Creative- Battle/dp/15...](https://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Winning-Creative- Battle/dp/1501260626)

<comment><USER14> Great book, read it many times, but what's the relevance here?

<comment><USER13> Resistance

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow, I'm shocked at how religious these people are about their ideas. There's a lot of statements that many in this video make that have no serious evidence behind them, beyond their own experimental analysis.

When I was younger, I watched an interview with Richard Feynman where he described how exceptionally difficult it is to truly know something. I wish more people took that approach when it comes to their own workplaces.

<comment><USER16> If that religious behavior led to products that people loved, is it really wrong to be religious about it? What's the alternative? Believe that you can't truly know anything and not build anything worthwhile?

As I've grown older, I've come to believe that holding strong opinions and being decisive is extremely important and impactful. It comes with the caveat though that as soon as you find you're wrong, you need to be able to change direction and not cling to your disproved beliefs.

<comment><USER17> > holding strong opinions and being decisive is extremely important

it is, and yes you can be wrong. but it's being strongly opinionated that matters, not being right (assuming you don't confuse that with just being stubborn). Many "meh" projects are just due to not being able to make strong, bold choices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I feel Jobs is exactly right and facinating how relevant this still is today.

However, the idea of employees as fanatical followers always struck me as too cult-like. I'd bet with superb vision and organization (managements job), and deep skill and insight (workers job), you can get the results without the fanaticism.

Maybe that aspect is just played up for thr media.

</comment><comment><USER19> Having recently watched the Steve Jobs film, I am inclined to ignore his advice on this, like I will skip his advice on parenting.

The only piece of good advice for someone in the position of a young Steve Jobs is to find a friend like Woz who actually knows how to do something.

<comment><USER20> Would you mind telling me which of the Steve jobs films is the one you're talking about?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Off-topic, but in the video: the signatures of every team member were inscribed inside the casing of each computer? That's mad cool. Had no idea they did that.

<comment><USER22> They also had pictures of the team in ROM. You need to activate the debug switch and then jump to the right address. Shown here: [https://youtu.be/wiTlRENwbXM](https://youtu.be/wiTlRENwbXM)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The survivorship bias in these vids and articles is overwhelming. Spend any time in corporate america and you'll see that the "success" stories are often run behind the fancy public veneer, by tyrannical megalomaniacs who give not a whit for their employees so long as the cog remains working hard for the machine.

<comment><USER24> Most of the similar materials are like that.

You could give the transcript of these interviews to a Mr-nobody-Joe-Schmoe and have them say it. And no one would care, if not laugh to their face.

It's 90% about _who_ says it, and maybe 10% about _what_ is being said.

<comment><USER25> It's not even secret sauce.

Pick up most management books and you'ok see the same.

Jack Welch's version was "get the right people on the bus and then decide where to go"

Lou Gestners is "culture is not part of the game, it's the only game"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Steve Jobs was really bad at a lot of things, but it seems that there were some things he was really good at. One of those things was recruiting really talented people -- Wozniak and the original Macintosh team for some early examples. I think it's possible that the quality of your team in many fields is so important that a lot of other stuff that seems like it should make a difference to the effort doesn't actually make a big one.

</comment><comment><USER27> I think one of the main things is that he instilled an "elite" mentality in the team. My best experiences have been where I was working in a tight knit team where everybody respected it each other and had high standards for new people. The worst experience is when management treats you like a cheap, replaceable commodity.

</comment><comment><USER28> I had a really really nice manager. He's technical but he admits he isn't catching up with the current technology landscape quickly, especially in his role he didn't have to be hands-on at all. From time to time he'd said to me "I don't see myself adding any values" because he felt "he didn't know what he should be doing".

However, he was a very nice people manager. He listens well, and he treats his team well. He would protect me even when I disrespected and frustrated the whole chain of commands (well they all respected my history of great contributions but they just weren't happy with the way I was acting - <USER2> due to my mental illness).

But my manager kept me under his arms, and would rely on the engineers to run the technical show as he sat in the backseat listening during meetings (he would step in if needed to keep "politics" out).

Often you don't get both "very technical + very good people manager" type of manager, so if it were up to me I'd pick a people manager who is great at communication and have respects for his/her engineers to do their jobs without tight oversight. If the team isn't able to resolve a technical decision, then it is the manager's time to become an arbitrator: let people cool down, break down the problem and then discuss options.

SJ's advice on not micromanaging is probably the only thing I can agree on. Don't micromanage, but make sure everyone knows you are the manager, and everyone on the team deserves to be kept informed by one another. There shouldn't be a "I am working on a ticket but I will update you when I am done in a week."

That was me. Don't be the old me. It was toxic, no matter how successful I was technically.

</comment><comment><USER29> Counterpoint: [https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...](https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Hide_Under_This_Desk.txt)

</comment><comment><USER30> I hope Tim Cook watches this, because my respect for apple is tanking.

<comment><USER31> May I ask why is your respect for Apple tanking?

I'm far from a "fanboy" on Apple; I am curious.

<comment><USER32> Software quality is tanking, for one- yesterday the phone crashed during a call. Never happened to me on any phone previously.

<comment><USER33> The myth that software was excellent under Jobs is just hat - a myth. I mean, iTunes was commissioned by Jobs, as well as many of early, clunkier iOS versions(no notification centre until much later, no copy/paste in the original iPhone, etc.

<comment><USER34> Jobs didn't commission iTunes. He bought it. It used to be known as SoundJam MP.

<comment><USER35> that's even worse as he could see plain as day the product they were investing in. with a commission you may claim it was a failed vision implementation

<comment><USER34> At the time, SoundJam MP was the best music player on any platform. Early versions of iTunes were pretty awesome, too.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>