[carloswilson]

Prior to GMail, we used to check our "Junk" folder occasionally in whatever email service we used.

When GMail arrived with its nice spam classification, it was great. Worked well, better than any competitors out there. This gradually conditioned us to ignore the "Spam" directory completely. Now things have moved to the opposite extreme. It is quite difficult to host independent email servers and send emails from it without GMail classifying it as spam. The high false-positive rate has become the norm. Instead of GMail trying to reduce the false-positive rate, it has now become the responsibility of those hosting email servers to jump through the hoops to ensure that their emails are not classified as spam.

Makes one think: If we knew what we know today about spam and abuse of Internet services, would SMTP have been designed the way it is designed today? What fundamental design change could have made it immune to spam? Perhaps a pull-based design instead of push-based? Perhaps something even cleverer?

[criley2]

My conspiracy theory is that google intentionally has degraded the ability of spam to be detected.

Why? Google Inbox did it absolutely perfectly. They wrapped up every email, from every major source, into nearly perfect bundles.

You could receive hundreds of unsolicited ("sOlIcItEd") marketing emails a.k.a. spam and Inbox would perfectly roll them into one bundle with a 1 swipe gesture to archive.

Then they killed Inbox and Gmail has functionally no ability to collate spam into a bundle and hide it.

That's intentional. Email marketing is huge, and google has a massive vested interest in ensuring that gmail users can see advertisements.