Despite Symantec’s report that spam levels are at their lowest since 2003 – the report claims that in this month, June 2015, spam levels are less than 50 percent of all emails sent and received – some of us are being hit with record levels of spam emails, like Linux boss Linus Torvalds.
The usually unflappable CEO was not impressed with Google’s spam filters this week, when he discovered that Google had marked hundreds of legitimate email messages sent to the Linux developer as spam. According to a Google+ post by Mr Torvalds, 1,190 out of approximately 3,000 legitimate emails were marked as spam.
“I don’t know how to even describe the level of brokenness in those kinds of spam numbers,” readers were told in Mr Torvalds’s post this week. “Quite frankly, that sucks. It’s not acceptable. Whatever you started doing a few days ago is completely and utterly broken.”
The ‘overenthusiastic’ spam filter fortunately only targeted mailing lists and not his personal emails, which is fortunate as it could have thrown a spanner in the works of Linux development and affected others, those reliant upon the work that the talented developer performs.
Despite the hassle, which he compared to “walking through a week worth of spam”, he still thinks favourably of Google’s email service, Gmail, albeit most of the time. “I’ve been using Gmail for several years now, and it has helped much more than it has hurt,” he said this week. Google has not yet responded to requests for comment.