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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?

#71

Post by lanstin »

skygazer wrote: post #54
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…

I should consider this - I run my own domains, and for years I just forwarded it to gmail, but I had so many cases when mails were put into spam, even replies to emails I had sent in the middle of a long conversation between myself and 1 other person, that I went to just self-hosted IMAP. Then for years I couldn't reliably send to google or yahoo or MS; I added SPF a while ago which help, but recently buckled down and put in SRS and DMARC and DKIM (and rspamd while I was at it); now I get the mail I want, and can mostly send mail without it being rejected (still have to ask people to check spam, but anyways many people I have to tell them I'm emailing them anyways if its important). However I have a lot of non-spam "promotion" emails that I don't want to see. If I could train gmail to not block legit stuff reliably, that would be worth trying again (I would say except for the privacy implications, but since so much email involves gmail on one side or the other, they probably get most of it anyways).

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

#72

Post by takanot »

Nextgrid wrote: post #62
plagiarist wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviousness in spam is a feature, they don't have to waste effort on people who know better.

This only applies to spam which requires significant follow-up effort from the spammer to respond to potential victims; effectively just 419 "advance-fee" fraud scams. For spam which only does not require manual effort on the other side, there is no reason to filter out potential victims and all the more reason to make it look as legit as possible to maximize conversion rates.

> For spam which only does not require manual effort on the other side, there is no reason to filter out potential victims and all the more reason to make it look as legit as possible to maximize conversion rates.

Unless there's a trade-off. Saying "respond now or your account will be erased!" doesn't sound very legit. But the number of additional victims the phisher gets by doing probably outweighs the number of more sophisticated victims he loses.

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

#73

Post by deckar01 »

Google just let through an email spoofed from my own domain (via a mailgun server). It was a phishing attack about the domain being shut down. The connection between the domain name and my personal email address have never been published. Either google or Squarespace leaked the info.

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

#74

Post by tianqi »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #57
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 se…

Which service provider would you recommend?

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

#75

Post by callumprentice »

Thank goodness. My Gmail address is my first name so I typically get many hundreds of spam’s a day which are almost all caught. Dozens in my inbox today so I figured something was up. Glad it’s not that the spam pedlars have suddenly gotten clever.

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

#79

Post by SoftTalker »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #50
SoftTalker wrote: post #38

I don't understand why spam detection is so complicated. I can tell with high accuracy if an email is spam just by the subject line. I'd think even basic ML could do this very reliably you don't need a bleeding-edge LLM to do this. Phishing is tricker because it can be very deceptive especially if you're being targeted specifically. But also usually pretty obvious.

ORLY? * Are you available? * Paul, can we have a zoom meeting with you on Monday? * Assistance for donation * Greetings!!! * some ideas for you * Refund request * Somethings not working * Manuel Montoya for roof work contractor * proposals for print * Invite Connection Half of the above are actual spam, half are not. Tell me which is which ...

If there's any question look at the sender. I delete half my email unread based on subject and sender alone.

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

#80

Post by SoftTalker »

DANmode wrote: post #68
SoftTalker wrote: post #38

I don't understand why spam detection is so complicated. I can tell with high accuracy if an email is spam just by the subject line. I'd think even basic ML could do this very reliably you don't need a bleeding-edge LLM to do this. Phishing is tricker because it can be very deceptive especially if you're being targeted specifically. But also usually pretty obvious.

You can tell from your subject lines. You cannot 100% tell from others’ subject lines, if you don’t know them personally.

Yes but I also don't have the ability to know what millions of accounts are receiving, unlike Google.
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