Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.
Now they will end up in Spam where I'll have to deal with them. (I keep my Spam folder empty.)


That's the root of your problem.

You should just remove all of your trash filters, let Gmail deal with your spam, and ignore the contents of your spam folder from now on.

The reason you see all those messages kicking into the trash folder is that it's processing your filters both on inbox messages and on spam messages. Just because one of your filters kicked something into the trash, that doesn't mean Google's spam filter didn't catch it. Google's spam filter probably did catch it, but your filter put it into the trash anyway.

The problem with you using filters to search for spam is, you personally can't possibly ever put in enough rules to correctly deal with spam. Google has spent much more time and development money on their spam-filtering engine, and it's the best. It beats every other method for spam filtering that I've ever seen. There's no way a simple word-matching filter will be satisfactory for you... As you've already seen, you're getting bitten by the false positives. Which is the main problem at the heart of any spam filtering engine.

Nothing that you do in your own personal filters is going to have a better false-positive/false-negative record than what Google already provides.
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Tony Fabris