Nightmare Before Christmas #1

Starting last week I started noticing a major decline in the number of incoming email. I no more had "interesting" mail every time I checked mail. Interesting mail typically means some mind-wrangling cairo issue, or a challenging bug, etc. I also noticed that I do not get cairo-commit messages anymore. On Wednesday I figured that I've not got rambokid's State of the Gtk+ Maintenance message.

My mail setup is that I forward all many different accounts to Gmail, and POP3 from there. This drastically reduces SPAM that I have to fetch into Evo over POP that is all by fast. Digging into Gmail's Spam folder, I found out that starting on December 13th, Gmail has been marking mail from many lists as spam. Mostly, some GNOME Bugzilla mail, some GNOME list messages, some TLUG messages, all cairo-commit, and most of cairo list. Apparently they made a change in their algorithms, whatever, and the recurring parts of these lists passed their threshold.

So, several hours later and lots of inspection, I recovered 800 messages and I'm pretty confident that's been all. Now Gmail's UI is pretty decent in most cases. Seems like no one spent much time on the mark-as-Not-Spam UI bits though. Some things that suck:

• Only 20 search results per page. Your preference of messages-per-page is not respected in search results,
• It's not intelligent enough to exchange the "Mark Spam" button with "Not Spam" search results of searches performed in the Spam folder,
• With the 20-per-page search result limitation, there comes a very useful feature: when you "select all", it gives you an option to "select all conversations that match this search". Cool! But as soon as you choose that option, the "Not Spam" action disappears. Doh!

Anyway, if you feel like there's been mail that I should have responded to but I didn't, feel free to send a note. non-list messages do not seem to be affected. And fortunately the Not-Spamming process seems to have taught it enough for now to not do it wrong for while; still, I'm disappointed.

¶ 12:13 AM