Can't Trust Gmail - Too Many False Positives

I have had a Gmail email address for about two years (more or less). But, as they say in baseball, three strikes and you're out. I will never again give it out to any person or place that I actually want mail from. It's now a sacrificial lamb, used only for website registrations at sites I don't really want to receive mail from.

Why?

False positives. Three to be exact. As documented on my Computer Gripes site, Gmail has classified important legitimate email messages as spam three times.

If you use Gmail as webmail, this may not be a big deal to you. But I have Gmail auto-forward email to another account. Messages that Gmail classifies as SPAM, I never get. And since I don't use the Gmail website, I don't review the SPAM folder. And even if I did, it collects about 30 or more SPAM messages a day meaning that unless I review it often, it would be easy to lose a needle in this haystack of SPAM.

Specifically:

May 4, 2007. I purchased lobsters from mainelobsterdirect.com. The company sent three email messages as my order went through the various stages of fulfillment. Each message was classified as SPAM by Gmail. The price of the order was, to me, significant and I got quite a scare when I thought my order was lost (it was a gift that had to be delivered on time).

November 5, 2006. I was transferring a domain to the registrar DirectNic.com. As part of the transfer process they send an email message to the Administrative contact of the domain. Gmail flagged this message from DirectNic as SPAM. They are a reasonably large registrar, so they no doubt send a lot of legitimate emails every day.

October 2, 2006. I own a computer from a company called Velocity Micro. In the past I have communicated with the company using my Gmail account without incident. Recently however, Google started labeling all messages from velocitymicro.com as SPAM.

All three senders are very legitimate businesses. More legitimate than Gmail itself.