Google seems to have tweaked their spam filters a bit in the last few days. I’ve noticed several messages that shouldn’t be tagged as spam going into the spam folder, a problem that I haven’t had on Gmail for quite a while.

As a matter of fact, I don’t even check it that often because of how good Google’s filtering has been. I just happened to give it a scan yesterday and found several messages that shouldn’t have been there.

Some clown recently started selling a program that lets people spam your Gmail accounts quite easily so that might have something to do with it. Google may be tightening up a little to filter out the added crap that produced.

Google’s spam filter “learns” as you tag messages as spam or not spam so it should improve again once you’ve marked the messages you want as not spam a few times.

And that actually brings up a good point about using spam filters. Whether you’re using Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook or some other email system, you should always use the buttons they offer to tag spam that gets through the filter as spam, as well as the button to tag messages that were tagged as spam incorrectly as being good.

As you do this, almost all email software filters will improve their filtering based on what you’re tagging. If you just delete the spam from your inbox, it doesn’t help improve the filter and those messages will continue to be missed.

In any case, if you’re using Gmail make sure you give your spam folder a good look for anything that got sent there by mistake. There’s nothing worse than missing an important email because it was marked as spam.