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Ask HN: Gmail spam filtering suddenly marking everything as spam?

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Re: Ask HN: Gmail spam filtering suddenly marking everything as spam?

#51

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

B1FIDO wrote: post #13
sss111 wrote: post #10

Any ideas on how to deal with stopping spam emails in general, scripts/tools etc?

Step zero. Never disclose your email address to anyone. This is very easy and straightforward. I operate 6 Gmail accounts, and three are "alts" where I've basically never given the address out to anyone at all, and they receive zero spam, zero UCE, zero marketing emails. Of course, on my "main" I've disclosed the address to many entities and I use it for sign-in and shipping and many things. And yes, I do receive spa…

I receive at least a dozen spam emails every day, sometimes as many as 60.

Rarely does more than one per day show up in my main inbox.

Why should I care who has my email address?

Re: Ask HN: Gmail spam filtering suddenly marking everything as spam?

#52

Post by jokethrowaway »

It's been happening for about a month for me. I had to start monitoring spam because legit emails end up there. Funnily enough I started having the opposite problem too - plenty of obvious spam and phishing attempt ending up in my mailbox.

I had to make a bunch of filters on my side.

One more reason to migrate to Proton

Re: Ask HN: Gmail spam filtering suddenly marking everything as spam?

#54

Post by skygazer »

sss111 wrote: post #10

Any ideas on how to deal with stopping spam emails in general, scripts/tools etc?

I have an absurd and overwrought system involving Gmail, and client-side rspamd and SpamSieve on my Mac. Gmail is (was?) overly aggressive flagging things as spam, so I have the client-side Bayesian filter check Gmail’s spam folder and rescue good email, so long as rspamd also says it’s not phishing. And then add sender to a Gmail whitelisting rule. All rescued email is flagged such that if I later manually move any of it back to junk, it stays there as spam and updates the corpus.

I now never get good email in the spam folder, and never get undetected spam in the inbox, and very occasionally get a spam erroneously rescued, but still visually flagged as iffy-but-maybe-ham.

If Gmail has been lax at filtering spam lately, I haven’t noticed, but perhaps the Bayesian filter has been picking up the slack.

Re: Ask HN: Gmail spam filtering suddenly marking everything as spam?

#55

Post by B1FIDO »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #51
B1FIDO wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Step zero. Never disclose your email address to anyone. This is very easy and straightforward. I operate 6 Gmail accounts, and three are "alts" where I've basically never given the address out to anyone at all, and they receive zero spam, zero UCE, zero marketing emails. Of course, on my "main" I've disclosed the address to many entities and I use it for sign-in and shipping and many things. And yes, I do receive spa…

I receive at least a dozen spam emails every day, sometimes as many as 60. Rarely does more than one per day show up in my main inbox. Why should I care who has my email address?

Well, spam is no big deal, and any scam that comes via email should not affect anyone who is educated and prepared for them.

Of course, with a well-known email address, you could run a higher risk of credential stuffing, and an account takeover by someone who hijacks your email account, and then pivots from there to taking other accounts.

But this seems to be a risk we all take: email addresses are meant to be shared, to be public, and to be well-known to anyone to correspond with us.

I will say that disclosing my email address to certain parties has had noticeable effects. For example, I used "MYADDRESS+Echovita@gmail.com" once, and only once. My godfather had passed away, and I ordered some flowers for his funeral. And I put that order through with that email address.

Well, Echovita themselves had a data breach shortly afterwards, and I was inundated with scam emails. Just all sorts of attackers and they were basically all using the same M.O. But they were readily identifiable because I had used that "+Echovita" to identify it uniquely. And they really haven't stopped coming in. It's been 5 years since that breach.

So yes, especially with untrusted parties, it may help to tag your email address. I don't worry about receiving spam anywhere. But like I said, since I've never ever disclosed the addresses of 2-3 of my "alt accounts" they simply never receive any mail at all, spam or no spam.

Re: Ask HN: Gmail spam filtering suddenly marking everything as spam?

#57

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

sss111 wrote: post #10

Any ideas on how to deal with stopping spam emails in general, scripts/tools etc?

Multiple accounts as others have said. The most powerful is to switch to a provider that permits custom domains and allows you to construct topic specific wildcard addresses on the fly. These can't be flagged as invalid or stripped like Google '+' suffixes and when compromised, you can filter them into oblivion and move on to something else. You also get the bonus of having the entire namespace to yourself and can select short addresses.

Re: Ask HN: Gmail spam filtering suddenly marking everything as spam?

#58

Post by Zigurd »

Briefly, this morning, I had the opposite effect happen to my Gmail inbox in which things that would normally land in the social and updates folders ended up in my primary folder. I don't know which I'd be more freaked out by: a broken Gmail spam filter or 18 inches of snow.

Re: Ask HN: Gmail spam filtering suddenly marking everything as spam?

#59

Post by jeffbee »

zukzuk wrote: post #24
mychele wrote: post #22

The promotions/updates/forums/etc classification is also down.

This has been “down” for me for a few months now, ever since Google tied this functionality to the same toggle that opts you in for using your email data for AI training. So now you can’t filter this stuff without also agreeing to a whole swath of unrelated and opt-ins. Ive since gone on an unsubscribe campaign, and things seem bearable now.

> Google tied this functionality to the same toggle that opts you in for using your email data for AI training

This never happened. It was a lie spread on Twitter. And now you are spreading it.

Re: Ask HN: Gmail spam filtering suddenly marking everything as spam?

#60

Post by jeffbee »

pushedx wrote: post #26

Noticed it immediately. I get a lot more spam messages per day than I thought that I did.

Everybody gets way more spam than they realize because Google doesn't deliver it to the spam label. 99% of it is rejected at SMTP time.
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