I activated my Gmail account earlier today, after having wrangled myself an invite, and have been impressed so far. I like the interface and the way that email conversations are grouped. The labels are a good feature, similar to the way I would put email in folders with other programs/sites, and the search capability looks very powerful, although I haven’t had the chance to really try it out since I only have about a half dozen emails so far.
What I am most intrigued by, however, is the spam filtering. There have been a few accounts of tests of gmail’s spam filtering capabilities, but what I’m interested in is how it works. In the Inbox, each message (or conversation, or whatever it is each thing in the inbox is) has a checkbox beside it, and a button up top saying report spam.
I found this intriguing because it doesnt’ merely mark an email as spam, but reports it.
Over on the side navigation bar, there is an entry that allows me to look at all my spam.
Clicking on this, I can see that there is spam already in the spam folder! This gmail account is only about 1 hour old, but it is already recognizing spam. How can this be possible?
My only guess is that the email filter develops its rules for recognizing spam based on the collective intelligence gathered by each gmail user! Brilliant! Presumably, the filtering is somewhat personalized, perhaps based on the content of the email I do not declare as spam. Every new user from now on has an automatic set of spam rules built in. This should only improve so that every new gmail account will be drawing upon a slightly better set of rules, and also incrementally improving the filter rules. This is so deliciously stigmergic!!