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Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?

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Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?

#231

Post by nzealand »

Ristovski wrote: post #9

Have gotten multiple such emails the last couple of weeks. I think Googles spam detection is a bit too much lax when the sender itself is using gmail. These might as well be hacked accounts which have already proven themselves to be valid and "human" at a previous point in time? I doubt gmails spam detection would let a brand new account spam CC'd emails without any sort of detection.

GMail has been making it harder to sign into old accounts, forcing me to verify my device and also add a phone number to my old email accounts, and then sometimes still refuses to let me sign in.

Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?

#232

Post by santiagobasulto »

tclancy wrote: post #102

Yes, I keep getting a bunch of “Your GEICO quote 1234” variations. My thought is spam is like weather fronts at this point: while it feels like that subject line should be obviously flagged up, there is probably some other storm of porn bot spam that is causing the machine learning or filters to bend in just such a way that the car insurance spam can seep through.

I’m also getting these insurance-like ones. Several passing for Statefarm. I might have received 50 in one day.

Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?

#233

Post by davchana »

Just putting out my experience with spam. I have a generic gmail email since 2008, & bought few dozen domains over these years for personal use, with varying tlds.

Since 2018 I am getting almost a spam rain, see statistics & logs of spam in this published google sheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSdZyRvDd0ES...

Almost every email has no text, just an image, with a text footer with Unsubscribe. But clicking each unsubscribe tells spammer this email address is hot & live. I made this mistake of clicking Unsubscribe few times in 2018. Now about few weeks ago I loaded images on one of the email by mistake.

Domains these emails sent from are typo, subjects are stupid offers.

A filter adds a label to these emails & deletes them. A google apps script runs once every 24 hours, fetches data from these emails with label X in trash, adds that data to Log Sheet I linked above. Then script removes the tag.

Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?

#235

Post by sonmicrosystems »

Even Gmail spam filtering is one of the best, it has its limit. The solution is to use different email addresses (aliases) to control who can send us emails: if we start to receive spams at one address, we can just disable it.

Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?

#236

Post by actuallyalys »

encoderer wrote: post #106
natch wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's baffling that google are letting these ones slip. Why would it be baffling? Google’s spam filters have always been extremely low quality, even mistaking email generated by Google itself as spam. They simply don’t have the pride of craftsmanship to improve it.

You live in a different universe than I do. Fascinating. In my world, spam was a true problem that was killing email. Truly killing it. You would have to create a new address every 6 months to stay ahead of the spam and have a functioning inbox. Very different world. Gmail fixed that. And for me, there have been issues from time to time and in fact i am getting this very spam myself, but gmail permanently stopped the…

Spam wasn't killing email for me, but Gmail was a noticeable step up for sure. I do wonder how much was innovation on their part and how much of it was simply executing the same filtering techniques really well.

Now, my impression is that all of the well-regarded email providers do a good job of handling spam—it's no longer a differentiator. (Although it might start to be again if Google has genuinely let their guard down.) Fastmail does a good job in my experience.

Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?

#237

Post by atregir »

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #21

For the last year or so I've noticed an increasing amount of my legitimate professional interactions going into my "Promotions" tab in Gmail. The effect of which has been, after discovering a few mishaps of this sort, to now regularly and meticulously go through a massive pile of "Promotions" just to make sure I haven't missed something legitimately urgent or important. Prior to Google's classification errors produci…

I could have written this. The exact same thing happens to me and now I am realizing you might be right and it might be on purpose so we scroll through all the unnecessary ads. Arrgh.

Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?

#238

Post by markogresak »

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #21

For the last year or so I've noticed an increasing amount of my legitimate professional interactions going into my "Promotions" tab in Gmail. The effect of which has been, after discovering a few mishaps of this sort, to now regularly and meticulously go through a massive pile of "Promotions" just to make sure I haven't missed something legitimately urgent or important. Prior to Google's classification errors produci…

You can disable the grouping feature.

What I did to reduce the noise in my mailbox is to unsubscribe from all marketing emails, and I move the ones that still come through to spam folder. It was a bit tedious at first, but now gmail is doing a pretty good job at automatically filtering out senders that do not respect my request to unsubscribe.

Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?

#239

Post by mauli »

moosedev wrote: post #101
jmcphers wrote: post #46

I have exactly the opposite problem: tons of legitimate email is getting flagged as Spam by GMail. It's now happening regularly with emails from people in my contacts with whom I regularly exchange messages . Mind-boggling. I know spam filtering is a hard problem, but these are just obvious misses.

Same. I'd gotten out of the habit of checking my Spam folder, having trusted Gmail to get it "correct enough" for years. But I looked recently and was amazed/horrified how much legitimate email was in there, including a friend's birthday event invitation that I would otherwise have missed. 20% of what is in my "Spam" folder today is what I'd call "spam" in the classical 90s/2000s-internet sense. Obvious trash/scam st…

I went from checking my spam folder, to creating a filter rule that moves all spam into the inbox. The filter is adding a label, so I can identify them, but still have them all visible for normal congestion.

Fun fact: from time to time I still have mails in my spamfolder... seems the filter does not always get applied.

Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?

#240

Post by eckesicle »

I've been getting these for a couple of months too. I don't speak Russian so I just picked a couple of common Cyrillic characters and created a filter that dumps any email with any such character in the spam folder.

What's more annoying than the emails is that I'm getting Google drive documents shared with me with in a similar format from Russian senders. There doesn't seem to be a way to block or spam sort Google drive docs.

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