You have 2 choices in spam filtering 1) Draconian filtering this is what Google and Sophos and all of the commercial spamfilter providers do. It keeps virtually all spam out of the inbox. But it DOES have a lot of false positives.
2) Light filtering. You won't get all spam from inbox you will get some. But you won't get false positives. Most corporations purchasing commercial spamfiltering do option 1. But there are ALWAYS user complaints roughly I get 1-2 a week from my 300 user base saying variations of "I'm missing a confirmation mail" or some border condition. Since all filtered spam is quarantined, my sysadmin has to waste time digging around in the quarantine to find that One Good Email and release it. If we try adjusting it so it does not false positive - that is more to option #2 - we get MORE complaints the opposite way - people asking "why am I getting so much spam" when they are complaining about 2-3 spams a WEEK in their inbox. But worse is that there's always going to be that ONE user out there who believes the cornpone spam and falls for it and clicks the link or makes the call and causes more mess for us to clean up. That's why we and most other orgs have ended up using option #1, draconian filtering. In your case, you COULD do the same thing our users do and complain to Google, hoping that another human than yourself would dig around releasing your one good email from your quarantine. Of course, the difference between our users complaining to us and your complaining to Google is you don't pay anything to Google thus Google will tell you to pound sand and dig through your own trash. With us our users pay our salaries so we can't do that. Perhaps there is a market out there for a new service, call it "emailspoiledusers.com" The way it would work is users like you would pay actual humans to periodically read all the crap in your spam filter and release the .0001% of good mail to your inbox. Hmmm I think I should patent that idea....lol My advice is to view this as the cost of a free and unfettered email system on the Internet. Look here. Don't you realize how incredibly free it is that ANYONE IN THE WORLD can type out an email basically saying virtually ANYTHING to you and send it to you and you will get it? I can point to dozens of politicians - our very own First Citizen Trump #1 among them - who would KILL for the ability to set his Maggaoots free to "make sure you got clean unspammed email that only said the correct things to you" What we have had for the last 25-30 years or so on the Internet is freedom of ideas that have NOT been gatekeeped, that for the last oh say 10,000 YEARS of civilization has been denied to people by Those In Charge. It has toppled governments, bankrupted companies, and done more good for humanity than pretty much any 1 thing previously that has come along. And before you get complacent, keep in mind in Portland OR right here we have the last 2 editors of the largest daily newspaper in the state - the Oregonian - who have turned off blog comment responses to their stories on their online newspaper - precisely because they got upset that their power to gatekeep stories was being usurped, because every time one of their reporters posted an online story on Oregon Live that concealed the real reasons for something, the blog readers would comment in response and call out the lying that was being done. Not everyone in the world is happy with the general populace having the power to know truth and the moment they get a chance to hide truth, they take it. They have NOT learned their lessons in the last 25 years and are still scheming to try and turn the clock backwards to the bad old days. To them - people like the Oregonian Editors - truth is a bad messy thing. I don't think that dealing with a couple dozen advertisements for hair tonics that were written by AI computers with an IQ of 20 that any 5 year old can see are baloney, in your email box every week, is too much to ask in exchange for this freedom. Ted -----Original Message----- From: PLUG <[email protected]> On Behalf Of American Citizen Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2026 1:36 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [PLUG] question on blocking spam mail Ever since I sent electronic mail to my insurance company last July, my mailbox is still being flooded by spam mail. Just recently 53 spam emails hit in just one day. If you examine the headers, they all appear to be coming from some computer network of people who have intimate knowledge of email servers and how to take advantage of the loop-holes in the email protocols. Is it worthwhile to try to contact Google, since it is google which is okaying the forward on this spam, and ask them to start blocking? My current email program (imap) is NOT blocking the incoming content, since google did put them into the SPAM folder, but occasionally a good email slips into this batch, so I cannot simply choose to auto-erase the content of the spam folder. Your thoughts? Randall
