I have a huge spam problem with gmail. Someone sold my email + first name. Googles spam filters are simply powerless if you include a first name in the email. I've reported these as spam (several a day) for months at this point.

Hell, it gets marked as important.

> Googles spam filters are simply powerless if you include a first name in the email

I think you're going to have to look elsewhere for a cause. Someone (probably several someones) sold out my email and first and full name. Gmail has no problem correctly categorizing all sorts of spam addressed to me by name.

I may have an explanation for that. Gmail is very good at detecting waves of spam mails while the wave is being sent out. Basically, a (bunch of) hacked server(s) start sending SPAM mails. After some messages google realizes that these servers have been hijacked and starts rejecting mails from them.

If your address happens to be among the first of the spammer's list, you will be hit by these emails. Otherwise when they send to your address google has already stopped accepting mails from that (those) ip(s) and you don't receive anything.

It looks like enjo's address comes way before than yours...

Whatever the cause is, it's still Google's fault/problem.

I too have a big gmail spam problem (related to my email address being very short and guessable), and mark as spam on average about 10-20 emails a day.

> Whatever the cause is, it's still Google's fault/problem.

Why is it that no matter what the cause is, you feel that Google is to blame?

Err... because Google's spam filter is letting the message in? Seriously, it is a spam message, delivered to Google, and Google put it in the inbox instead of the spam filter. I don't know how much more clear cut it could be.

I have a special "don't care" mail account whose mails are delivered to its own folder (included in the shown stats). I do get a spam message in that folder very occasionally (as in once per month), but it's really far off from becoming annoying.