Google's Gmail service is vigilant about rooting out spam. So vigilant... that their own standard "relationship emails" with their customers are labelled as spam!

I've been using Gmail as my primary email interface for a while now. I like the fact that I can pull mail from multiple accounts and respond to that email using "From" addresses representing those accounts. I like the way mail is organized into labels rather than hierarchical folders, and I like the filtering capability that lets me pre-assign labels to mail as it comes in based on the "From" address, the "To" address, the subject, etc.

But Gmail is far from perfect. As an AJAX-heavy Web 2.0 application, it sometimes gets bogged down. The grouping of all emails into "conversations" can be frustrating (e.g., when you want to delete a single email from a conversation or when you change the subject line). And when you do have a problem or a question, Google isn't especially receptive to giving you a way to contact them about it.

One particular problem that's been increasingly annoying is Gmail's unflinching tendency to mark my email as spam, even if I've received email dozens of times from a given address, even if I've gone out of my way to mark it as "Not Spam" dozens of times, even if I add the address to my "contacts" (even though an address like dontreply-newsflash@somewhere.com isn't one I could contact even if I wanted to). It was becoming ridiculous, getting to the point where I had to sift through mail marked as spam in order to make sure I wasn't missing any real email from real people. (Kind of defeats the purpose of having a spam filter, don't ya think, if you must read through your spam folder to check on such things.)

Never mind for the moment that aside from Google's "forums" where you're supposed to go to find answers when these problems occur, there is no way to report a problem like this. The other day I asked Gmail to authorize another email address for me, and this required confirmation from me that I really was the person associated with that address. (Makes sense, no?) Gmail faithfully sent me the confirmation email I was supposed to respond to... or did they? It should have been forwarded to my Gmail account for me to see, but it just wasn't there? Why?

I think you can guess why: it was marked as spam. Yes, a confirmation email from Gmail was marked by Gmail as spam.

It's enough to make you switch over to Yahoo... maybe...