In 2020, I took a Gmail account I had used for almost nothing and dedicated it to two purposes in life: to subscribe to the Arlington List and to email people on the Arlington List privately.
(The Arlington List is the storied high-volume discussion list of the town of Arlington, MA.)
I subscribed and just let it run. I have not gotten any non-list email at this address in years, nor have I sent or received any private (non-list) emails with it in years - something like 3.
Of the emails I have ever received - 99%+ being list traffic, Gmail assigned:
• 20,668 to "Inbox"
• 26,565 to "Forums"
• 2,605 to "Updates"
• About 300 to "Promotions" which I unassigned before realizing I should capture this.
• Some non-zero number to spam, but how many I don't know because I wasn't monitoring it closely and some got auto deleted I think. I think I caught a few dozen over the years.
Now, these categories aren't exclusive and Gmail won't tell me how many emails are in my account total, so I have no idea how these actually break down. [Edit: it figured it out! 39,895 total.]
Also some comparatively small number of list emails might have been reassigned by me in early days.
But basically this is what Gmail's default "smart" filtering did left to its own devices, in the easiest of all possible cases.
In case it weren't clear, this is inexcusably wrong. All emails came from the same sender and were clearly all marked as being part of the same service - both in the human-readable parts and with all the conventional header fields for identifying a Mailman list to the recipient server.
This test reveals that Gmail's smart filtering is profoundly terrible in a way which is invisible in normal usage. You would never find the misfiled emails if there were other sources they would be lost among. There would always be an excuse for why it misfiled them.
Without other senders, it demonstrates that Gmail can't reliably file things sensibly.
(The Arlington List is the storied high-volume discussion list of the town of Arlington, MA.)
I subscribed and just let it run. I have not gotten any non-list email at this address in years, nor have I sent or received any private (non-list) emails with it in years - something like 3.
Of the emails I have ever received - 99%+ being list traffic, Gmail assigned:
• 20,668 to "Inbox"
• 26,565 to "Forums"
• 2,605 to "Updates"
• About 300 to "Promotions" which I unassigned before realizing I should capture this.
• Some non-zero number to spam, but how many I don't know because I wasn't monitoring it closely and some got auto deleted I think. I think I caught a few dozen over the years.
Now, these categories aren't exclusive and Gmail won't tell me how many emails are in my account total, so I have no idea how these actually break down. [Edit: it figured it out! 39,895 total.]
Also some comparatively small number of list emails might have been reassigned by me in early days.
But basically this is what Gmail's default "smart" filtering did left to its own devices, in the easiest of all possible cases.
In case it weren't clear, this is inexcusably wrong. All emails came from the same sender and were clearly all marked as being part of the same service - both in the human-readable parts and with all the conventional header fields for identifying a Mailman list to the recipient server.
This test reveals that Gmail's smart filtering is profoundly terrible in a way which is invisible in normal usage. You would never find the misfiled emails if there were other sources they would be lost among. There would always be an excuse for why it misfiled them.
Without other senders, it demonstrates that Gmail can't reliably file things sensibly.