Arrogance, thy name might be Gmail

Do you have, or are you contemplating having, a Gmail account? I set up a Gmail account quite some time ago. My wife's nephew, the computer genius, recommended it. On the whole, it was good advice.

But something changed about a month ago, maybe a bit earlier than that. Gmail began an aggressive filtering for spam. We all hate spam, don't we? So this couldn't be a bad thing, could it?

Turns out that it is. Turns out that Gmail sees spam almost everywhere. Email from friends, associates, just about any business, even from themselves. Yes, that's right... even from themselves. After I discovered some desired email had been deemed spam, I went to a Gmail forum and asked a simple (I thought) question: How do I turn off spam checking?

It turns out that you cannot. That answer came through and was delivered to my inbox without problems. However, a follow-up response was deemed spam and tossed blithely into the spam folder. Since I use Live Mail for my email client, I did not see this for quite some time. You see, it is the online folders at my account on Gmail.com where this alleged spam is sent.

The interesting thing is that it was suggested that I could create a filter which would send all mail addressed to me to my inbox.

Here is the suggestion: There's no way to turn off the spam filters, but you can bypass them.  Go to Settings->Filters and create a filter for anything TO you can check the box for "Never send it to spam".  You'll get it all in your Inbox.

Funny thing is, there's a lot of mail that I want that is not addressed directly to me. It is to mailing lists, to "undisclosed recipients", and so forth.

So, now I am wondering just how wise I was to make the move to Gmail. And also wondering why Gmail thinks it knows better than its clients what is spam and what is not.