Google, while testing its new GMail email, has issued trial accounts to many Blogger owners and search/email opinion leaders and journalists. Recently there has been a discussion on the Blogger User Support group about GMail not mixing with Yahoo email addresses. When switching Yahoo Groups addresses from previous emails to Google GMail addresses, the GMail spam filter automatically filed the Yahoo Verification Emails as spam. If you subscribe to Yahoo Groups and use Google GMail as your main email address, this should help sort out the problem.
Highlights from the discussion:
Cassidy: Is it just me, or does Gmail block Yahoogroups? I’ve been trying for 2 days to get my Gmail account verified but it will not receive the Yahoogroups verification address. Has anyone actualluy managed to get yahoogroups to work with Gmail at all and if so how?
Phil: Look in your gmail spam folder: they call the verification mail spam, and the spam folder doesn’t change in any way to tell you that there’s anything in it. Pretty awful “welcome to gmail” given how many of us want to use it for exactly that.
I just sent another Yahoo Groups verification email to myself, and it went straight to the spam folder. However, looking at it I’m a bit inclined to agree with Gmail: they would need to special-case Yahoo,
which then leaves them open to people faking being Yahoo to get past the spam filter. You see, the first line of the text/html part is
and on the whole, I’d like to have my email server think that anything which puts a 1×1 image from a URI with “ad” in it before even the opening html tag is spam. That’s evil, nasty, deceptive, and looks
like the behavior of the most cretinous sellers of sugar pills. What alternative do they have? “HTML email with a 1×1 image outside the HTML is spam unless the 1×1 image is from yahoo.com, which is welcome to invade the privacy of our users”?
David: I experienced the same thing as Phil. I’m ok with this for a few reason.
1 – Similar to Phil, I would want any email with a 1×1 pixel image to be considered spam by my spam filter since this is something a lot of spam does.
2 – I don’t mind some false positives (non-spam email marked as spam) from time to time. It shows that the spam filter is doing something.
3 – The tools exist in Gmail to unmark the email as spam at which point it is automatically moved to the Inbox.
What I’d like to see is an enhanced spam filter whereby if enough Gmail users unmark email from a particular email address or domain the filter no longer considers such email as spam.
Meanwhile, Oliver Travers has found another relationship between GMail and Yahoo Groups, the ability to block out ad interstitials and sort group discussions using GMail technology:
“You know those unbearable intersticials at Yahoo Groups that get in the way of reading a message every 4 posts or so? Just subscribe your gmail address on a post-by-post basis, and you no longer have to bear with them to browse list archives. I don’t want to clog my own POP3 accounts with discussion list archives, but Gmail looks just fine for that purpose.”
