But today I noticed a horrifying false-positive (FP) problem. In the anti-spam world, an FP is your worst enemy: it’s the unlucky event when you mis-classify a normal email as spam. On Gmail, that means an email I actually wanted to get ended up in the “Spam” folder. That can be bad, and in some cases, catastrophic.

I got concerned when a friend of mine told me that a conversation between a few of us (all Gmail users, both hosted and regular) ended up in his Spam folder. I was appalled, and then worried. If a conversation about getting together and buying tickets for a concert got buried, what else might be going awry? It turns out, a lot. Here’s some of the legitimate email I found in my Spam folder:

• Amazon receipts, shipping notices, newsletters, and special offers.
• Amazon Associates (advertising) newsletters and earnings notifications.
• All communications from the Center for Inquiry SF, so I missed several interesting events.
• Notification of my free DLC songs from Rock Band 2.
• A coupon from the awesome store Racks & Stands.
• Facebook notifications.
• Various Xbox Live items.
• Every single communication (including a donation receipt) from the “No on 8” campaign which, ironically, Google publicly backed.
• MySQL conference and release announcements.

What the hell, Google?  That’s a terrible FP record and a really broad list of categories to screw up, and that’s just over the last 30 days.  Please do better.