My letter to Google:

Subject: Spam spam spam spammity spam

Your spam filtering is terrible. And I mean that in the most constructive way possible, but it is. It is way behind both Hotmail and Yahoo in many ways. I realize that the service is still in beta and that this is probably one of the issues that you will dealing with continually for the life of the service, but as it is right now a gmail account that comes to the attention of the spammers will soon be unusable.

I have an account on my own domain that I heavily use, but is unfortunately very spam-ridden, and I have historically forwarded it to Hotmail with decent results. Hotmail removes almost all of the spam leaving me with, on average, 6 spams a day in my spam email box, and one or two false negatives in my inbox a week. I have now forwarded it to this gmail account, and am getting 20 spam an hour in my spam mail folder, and 10 false negatives a DAY. This makes it nearly unusable. It seems that you are not blocking any spam email at all but just sending it all to the spam folder, and that is a huge mistake. If it is obviously spam it should not even show up in my spam folder, because I have to go through that looking for the false positives, i.e. the good messages you mistakanly marked as spam, and wading through hundreds of spam a day is not workable.

Again, I realize that this is a beta project and I am sure that this is something you are working on heavily right now, but I just wanted to comment on how much needs to be done on this issue. You have done some great and interesting things here, but it will all be moot if it gets washed away in the sea of spam.