I haven’t seen it, but someone has got to be working on it, so where is the open source webmail app, that can front-end my IMAP server, and works like Gmail? So calling out to the LazyWeb I haven’t seen it, but someone has got to be working on it, so where is the open source webmail app, that can front-end my IMAP server, and works like Gmail? So calling out to the LazyWeb

Its funny, Gmail just added the one feature that I was missing so much that I was ready to leave, the ability to customize the From: field, and yet I’m more ready to leave then ever. Why?

Spam false positives.

Bad Spam Filtering

False positives, are unforgivable in a spam filter, especially lots and lots of them. False positives mean you have to manually look through every spam message you get and manually check that each one isn’t spam. I don’t know what algorithm Google is using, but it sucks. I’ll admit my address has been out on the web for years, and so I’d understand if spam was getting through (and it does), but what I can’t understand is why:

  • mail from the moderated mailing lists I’m on get flaggeds as spam
  • mail from people already in my inbox gets flagged as spam
  • mail from people who I’ve emailed gets flagged as spam
  • mail from Google HR personnel

In particular Gmail seems to hate the microformats list, of which a significant percentage of the traffic gets flagged as spam. Editorial commentary I wonder?

Which is really a shame, as Gmail (or any of the centralized mail houses) should be in possession of plenty of information to do an excellent job on the filtering.

The Potential

And once we had our own Gmail-like client we could adding features without having to rely on Greasemonkey scripts!

My short list:

  • mailing list aware
  • roles ala Pine
  • GPG integration
  • archive this thread (aka conversation) and all future messages to it

That plus client independence with the IMAP backend. There have been a few good comments added to my original Gmail IMAP post if anyone is looking for inspiration.