Linus Torvalds sends an open letter: blasting the Google Mail team

I've praised your spam filters before, but I'm afraid I have to take that back. I checked the spam you blocked last week, and I've caught a third of it.

I've found that some of the things you guys have been doing lately are simply disasters! Of the approximately 1,000 spam threads I checked, 228 were incorrectly marked as spam!

This is not the 0.1% false positive rate you boast about. A full 20% of the emails in my spam folder are mistakenly targeted, which is almost a quarter.

This is a terrible situation. On some of my better email pages (I set it to display 50 emails per page), almost half of the "junk" are innocent.

Frankly, this is terrible. It's unacceptable. It shows that the changes you started some time ago were a complete failure.

I discovered this problem while exchanging emails with someone. Suddenly, I realized that several emails were missing and had been treated as spam. These emails contained some patches and problem descriptions.

They didn't try to send me a big JB or tell me someone was trying to scam me.

You guys are really stupid, go eat shit, what's the use of an email filtering mechanism with a 20% error rate?

[Note 1: The incident seems to have started 4 days ago. As of July 13, a large number of lkml's emails were treated as spam.]

[Note 2: Final figures, a total of 1190 out of 3000 spam emails were not "spam", so the actual error rate was a worse 30%. Blocking started at 1pm on Monday, July 13th. It was so clear that I could point to the exact start time]

[Note 3: It's not just patches, and it's not just lkml. There are also things like Junio's recent git v2.5.0-rc2 announcement that were affected. The new email filtering mechanism "persecutes" all emails with mailing lists. While I was writing this paragraph, two more of my innocent emails were "caught in the crossfire"]