Finding Legitimate Emails In Your Gmail Spam Folder

I can never tell when Gmail is going to start taking my legitmate email and consider it “spam” … there seems to be little rhyme or reason.

Sometimes Gmail disposes of some pretty important email in it’s quest to protect from Spam.

Here’s a quick technique to help you identify real mail you might trash.

From Technology Evangelist

Gmail’s spam filtering is pretty darn good, but it does grab the occasional false-positive. That can be a drag, especially if you have thousands of emails in your spam folder.

Here is a simple trick that should help you narrow down the field within your spam folder by filtering it for terms spammers don’t generally use.

The search show below has two parts: The first [in:spam] narrows your gmail search to just messages in your spam folder. The second part [ed] is a keyword search of messages within that folder.

In my case, I found that searching by first name filtered my spam folder from 8000+ messages down to around 80, and of those 80 around 8 were legitimate messages. However, none of them were critical messages - they were simply things like reminders that my Geni.com family tree was growing.

Finding the right keyword can be tricky. And the first name trick may not work if you have a firstname.lastname@yourdomain.com email format.

Others searches worth trying are common user names you use.