Opendotdotdot Comments: An Apology

As several dozen of you will have noticed, I haven't been posting comments to some stories. The reason is simple: I never saw them. Gmail's spam filter decided that most of the comments sent to me for moderation should be summarily eaten.

It is only now, having gone through a few thousands spam messages, that I've found most of them (I hope) and posted them. Apologies for the delay. If I've missed any, please feel free to send them through again, and I'll try to save them from Gmail's anti-spam maw.

What's particularly worrying is that Google is rejecting messages from blogspot.com - it's own domain. Worse, I've found many Google alerts, from the google.com domain, also classed as spam. If Gmail can't even tell whether messages from Google are not spam, there's clearly something seriously wrong with Google's filters.

Anyone else having the same problems?

Google Googlied by Spaiku Adages

Today was a black day in the annals of my Gmail account: I received my first piece of spam. You might think I should be rejoicing that I've only ever received one piece of spam, but bear in mind that this is a relatively new account, and one that I've not used much. Moreover, Gmail comes with spam filtering as standard: you might hope that Google's vast computing engines would be able consistently to spot spam.

So far they have: the spam bucket of my account lists some 42 spam messages that Google caught. The question is: why did Google get googlied by this one? It's not particularly cunning: it has the usual obfuscated product names (it's one of those), with some random characters and the usual poetic signoff.

Actually, now that I come to check, this turns out to be slightly special:

Work first and then rest.
Actions speak louder than words.
Old head and young hand.

Maybe this is Gmail's Achille's Heel: it is defenceless in the face of spam haiku (spaiku?) adages.