Yesterday I learned that GMail, Google’s e-mail product, was spam boxing replies to e-mails that I have sent to other people. As a software developer I find this behavior strange. If I was designing a spam filter I would assume that e-mail replies that have knowledge of that e-mail were not spam. That is an easy conditional to test for. Yet the evidence suggests that Google’s sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms do not do this. Their support simply said to check my filters and mark the replies as not spam. They did not even offer to send a towel to wipe the egg I got on my face from thinking folks were not responding to my queries.

This does not mean I will abandon GMail. For better or worse they have figured out e-mail better than anyone else. Sadly some mail senders have not figured out some of the newer e-mail rules or technologies and I have had to create a bunch of filters to keep them out of my spam box. Yet overall I do not get spam in my regular inbox. Their interface and ability to manage my email is superior to any other solution I have tried. My biggest complaint used to be the lack of functional keyboard shortcuts in their iPad app and they even fixed that. I have long been waiting for someone to beat them at this game, but no sign of that exists. Therefore, I am stuck.