I hope your mail isn’t landing in my spam folder

So, spam now accounts for 90-95% of all e-mail. That’s up from 5% in 2001, and 70% in 2004 when the federal CAN-SPAM Act went into effect. That’s depressing.

Personally, I’m not bothered too much by receiving spam, since Gmail does a pretty good job filtering it. But where it has an impact is that I’m pretty certain that the occasional “false-positive” — an e-mail meant for me that’s not spam but is caught by the filter — is going into my spam folder.

I used to check the spam folder periodically, scanning through looking for personal mail put there by mistake. But that’s untenable these days with the volume of spam that Gmail catches on my behalf. I don’t even bother looking there any more.

But I often wonder what I’ve missed.