Aaron Pratt wants you to spam his Gmail account. He wants to know a)how long it takes to fill up a gig of space and b)how well Gmail’s spam filters work. For the record, and the spam bots, his address is prattboy@gmail.com.
Discuss the Gmail spam test in WebProWorld.
On May 8th he reported that “I am using 0% of 1000 MB (4 MB). If this were a Yahoo! Mail account, it would have been full today. (Really puts into perspective how quickly your address can be spread!)”
Out of 527 total messages on that day only 16 were “conversations.” Gmail labeled 114 of these as spam, giving his filter a 22% catch rate on that day. This was before he started labeling messages as spam.
He also noted that: “Messages containing ‘ADV:’ and ‘adv:’ in the subject are not automatically classified as spam.”
On the 12th he received a “3 MB attachment that alleges to be a movie about penis growth helped to bring the inbox size to 16 MB.”
He wondered if since Yahoo and Hotmail don’t allow files of that size, “could movies in your Gmail account be the future of spam? Larger mail box sizes certainly open of the door, but I hope we don’t see spam move in this direction.”
He started “teaching” his account what is and isn’t spam on the 10th, and on the 12th reported that, “the spam filters have not shown any improvement since yesterday, but we’ll see what happens. To Gmail’s credit, it did correctly filter a spam message from an individual who happens to share my uncle’s name.”
He mentioned in WebProWorld that, since marking certain emails as spam, he’s seen “no noticeable change yet, but I don’t think it’s a fair assessment to say it’s not working since we don’t know how Gmail’s spam filters work, and how often they are updated.”
Phillip Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped has already filled his Gmail account to capacity – beyond capacity in fact. He was “not able to send Gmails. However, incoming mails still still got through, even at ‘1021 MB (102%) of my 1000 MB.'”
He wondered, “could it be Gmail storage is in fact unlimited?”
Visit Pratt’s site: http://gmail.prattboy.net/
Garrett French is the editor of Murdok’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.
