Gmail Spam Filter Getting Worse

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I’m sure it can’t be just me but I think Gmail’s spam filter is deteriorating. Over the last few weeks, I have noticed a few more spam mails ending up in my inbox. Then a couple of days ago, I noticed a few false positives. Now it seems like its an epidemic!

Yesterday, I had to rescue at least 50 emails marked as spam. Most of these were regular mailing list mails I’ve been getting for ever.

I’m finding that most, but strangely not all, my blog comment notification emails are marked as spam. Note that this is not the moderation notification. That gets through ok. But when I approve the comment here on the blog, the notification email proper gets flagged as spam and I have to rescue it.

What gives Google? When I mark a mail has ‘Not Spam’ are you learning? Thunderbird does! It seems you do not.

Update:
I’m expanding this post to clarify my grumble somewhat.

I know that Gmail has to deal with millions of spam emails a day, they do a very good job. I also know that the spammers adjust their spam. I can see that when a new mass mailing gets through for a day (sometimes two), but then stops as Google adjust their filters to catch them.

My big, big, big concern is that almost all of the false positives are from senders I’ve been receiving mail from for more than a year.

I don’t mind the odd false positive, but more than 50 in one day!

For those who mentioned it, I do use thunderbird, for exactly the same emails and more: Gmail only gets copies of my mail. Thunderbird hasn’t given me a false positive for six months. Not one! To be fair I get more spam in my inbox with Thunderbird.

For me the tool not catching enough spam and having to deal with it by hand is a nuisance, but if I accidentally delete just one legitimate email because it got put in my spam folder as a false positive is unforgivable.

More Visitors, More Stats

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I can’t quite believe the growth in visitors to this site. Since I posted about my visitor count passing the quarter of a million mark on June 1st, I have had another 50,000 visitors taking the total count to well over 300,000! That’s 25,000 visitors a month. For little old me, I find that quite impressive. I’ve also had over half a million page views in that time. The page views counter passed three and a half million a while ago.

I know that being one of the feeds to the WordPress dashboard helps, but the vast majority of my visitors still come from search engines. Eleven of my top fifteen referrers are search engines. Of those, Google accounts for a whopping 76% of search engine hits. In fact, as I write this, the last 15 minutes has seen 15 unique visitors 12 of whom are visiting old pages via search engines.

With all this visitor activity, it certainly seems that my page caching is holding out ok. I still get some weird slow-downs on the server, but I think some of that is down to the statistics package I use, Power Pphlogger is starting to creak at the seams. I doesn’t appear that version 3 is going to appear any time soon, so I’m starting to look elsewhere.

When Did You Last Backup Your WordPress?

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Don’t forget we are only half way through WordPress Backup Week.

WordPress is celebrating blog security and protection with WordPress Backup Week July 23-30.

WordPress, one of the most popular blogging and website management tools, is sponsoring WordPress Backup Week July 23-30. Step-by-step backup instructions will be available in the online manual, the WordPress Codex, and online in the WordPress Support Forum to help you through the process.

There is lots of help on the WordPress Backup page, covering common hosting control panels like cPanel, Ensim, Plesk, and many more. It also covers using phpMyAdmin and other, simpler, methods. Lots of links to resources too. It’s worth a read, even if you have a backup routine, to make sure you are covering everything. You might pick up a useful tip to do it more efficiently.

Read on for the full press release. Continue reading →

10 Tips For Safe Cycling

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I got a pingback from Adrian Trenholm who has written a great piece, 10 tips for safe cycling, partly inspired by my recent accident. He lists

  1. Wear a helmet.
  2. Know the rules of the road and stick to them
  3. Concentrate.

and more, each with a good explanation why. I’d like to add a couple more points:

Look after your bike. In the past I have found that a combination of worn brake blocks, stretched cables, and wet rims meant that I suddenly found nothing was going to slow me down!

Don’t run red lights. This is really part of Adrian’s number two item, but I suspect the single most annoying thing cyclists do to city motorists is ignore red lights. Or rather, not ignore them, but go through them anyway. I know it annoys me when I’m driving, and I never do it when I’m cycling. Just remember that those drivers you’ve just left at the lights will be passing you in a minute. Only now they’re annoyed with you. When you need to swerve to avoid that pothole, they’ll be much less inclined to give you the room you need.

Adrian also has a great discussion, “Never, ever get into a fight with a ‘bike-hater.'” in the same post. I couldn’t agree more. I sometimes shock myself when I react badly to a car ‘buzzing’ me, or to a beeped horn because someone thinks I shouldn’t be on the road. It’s easy to want to be aggressive when you are ‘bullied’ by a car, but as Adrian says…

Let’s be clear about this: you might be in the right, but your antagonist has over a ton of metal at his disposal. When a cyclist mixes it up with a motorist, the cyclist will always lose. Just let the motorist go.

Don’t let us put you off though. Cycling to and from work is a great way to get fit. My trip home takes pretty much the same time as public transport, so I’m not taking more time out of my day. Because it serves a purpose (getting me home) it’s much easier to stick with it than, say, going to the gym. When I had a gym membership it was easy to say to myself “I’ll leave it tonight and go tomorrow… or next week”.

Give it a try. Get that bike out of the shed and try riding to work a couple of days a week.

Another Bike Crash

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In other news, I had another accident on my bike yesterday. On my way home from work, a truck pulled out on me whilst on a roundabout (here is a great introduction to roundabouts for Americans). This ought not to happen as I had right of way, but I can only assume that either the truck driver didn’t see me, or that he assumed that I was going slowly. As a result, he pulled out on me; slowly because it was a big truck; and I had to swerve round him. Unfortunately he was too slow for me to get completely round the back of him. With a 4 or 6 inch high kerb approaching, I had to turn the bike and slide it and thus me along the floor to stop.

I hit the floor hard and slid to a stop. As I got up a chap pulled my bike off the road and started asking if I was OK. A couple of other people kindly stopped to check too. The truck driver was, of course, long gone. My arm was badly grazed and my ribs hurt. After a couple of deep breaths, I figured they weren’t broken. Luckily too, my bike wasn’t damaged, though my shorts now have a hole, and the screen on my mobile phone is cracked and it only shows about a third of the display.

So, after thanking the people who had stopped, I got back on my bike and cycled the rest of the way home — I had about another 9 miles to go. By the time I got home, my ribs were hurting a lot and I knew I would be off my bike again for at least a few days. That’s a real shame too as I’d just got back into doing a full 70 miles a week.

After some more hassle I won’t go into right now, Jan gave me a lift up to our local A&E department. It was busy and I ended up waiting for two and a half hours to see a doctor. He listened to my chest and decided nothing was broken or even cracked and that I didn’t need an x-ray. I waited another half hour to get a dressing on my arm and then made my way home.

I’ve had to have the day off work today, it’s quite painful to move around. When I sit or stand still, it feels fine. But as soon as I move the pain kicks in. I’ll probably be off work tomorrow too.

Site updates

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Page Caching

I’ve made some minor changes to the blog over the last few days. Firstly, I’ve been using Ricardo Galli’s WP-Cache 2.0 plugin. This is an efficient WordPress page caching system. It should make the site much faster and responsive. WP-Cache started life as the “Staticize Reloaded” by matt and billzeller. I like the fact that it automatically invalidates the appropriate cache files when you publish a post or page or comment.

It also allows you to have portions of you page remain dynamic. This is fantastic. I needed my page counter to remain dynamic in order to be accurate.

Random Gallery Image

Someone kindly pointed out that clicking on the random Gallery image in the side bar was opening up the gallery in the tiny little iframe still in the sidebar. Not very useful that. I remembered that I could include the random image directly in the sidebar, but that the code wasn’t XHTML compatible. With the caching plugin it would also mean that the image would stop being random.

For my second tweak I ended up having to do a couple of things. One was to hack the Gallery code to produce valid XHTML. Unfortunately the dynamic part of the caching code which allows you to include a php file assumes that it needs to prepend ABSPATH to the include. That’s not the case for the random gallery image. So the last task was to tweak the dynamic part of the caching plugin so that I could include my gallery random image code from an http url.

Update 21/07/2005: I’ve submitted a trac ticket with a patch against the latest revision to implement this.

Speed up

I hope these changes help the site to run faster. It had been slowing down again. This was due to too many externally generated content in the sidebars. This is all cached now so things should be much quicker.