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Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?

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Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?

#91

Post by hollowturtle »

vmoore wrote: post #79

Migrated to Fastmail a few weeks ago. It's going swimmingly. The private addresses feature is brilliant. I can tell what service sold my address or leaked it, or otherwise gave it out somewhere against my consent. If Gmail allowed for private aliases it would thwart spam, but they won't implement it because they're anti-privacy.

Jumped on the fastmail train almost a year ago and can't complain, it's the only inbox I actually enjoy having. But I haven't been able to fully abandon gmail yet, according to my password manager I still have ~70 accounts registered with gmail over 190 total, it's been a pain so far...

Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?

#92

Post by mcintyre1994 »

smt88 wrote: post #62
jonas-w wrote: post #6

They announced that their spam filter got to good and that they will allow political spam to go around their spam filter. https://www.androidpolice.com/gmail-political-spam-experimen...

It's not because the filter was "too good," it's because political campaigns use hyper-aggressive email tactics that they learned from digital marketers. Trump's campaign(s) apparently took this to a new level (a friend of mine says he'd get up to 10 Republican emails every day , many of which had alarming subject lines) and now Republicans are claiming to be treated unfairly.

I'm not in the US and I don't think I've ever been emailed by a political party in the UK where I live. So I don't know how it normally is. But one of my throwaway emails somehow ended up on a Trump campaign list in 2020 and it was pretty insane. I'd get multiple emails per day saying I'd been hand picked by Trump to do something, which was usually either to send him some money or fill in a survey. Once I was hand picked by someone to e-sign Trump's birthday card, and probably also to send him some money. I can definitely see how any remotely good spam filter would be catching a lot of that stuff. And also there was no opt-in before they started emailing me and their unsubscribe button never worked.

Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?

#93

Post by fluoridation »

twic wrote: post #90
rconti wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is incredibly strange to hear from you (and others in this thread) who don't have a spam problem with GMail. From everyone I've talked to, it seemed endemic. From my experiences with my own account (circa 2004), GMail has moved backwards in recent years. I'd say it became a serious problem a few years ago. Marking things as spam is useless because then you immediately start getting legitimate mail marked as spam.…

Zero spam in my inbox, zero items in the spam folder (where they are deleted after 30 days). GMail is not my primary email, though. I use it for Meetup.com, Slack, Steam, maybe one or two other things. A quick google search suggests that my email address does not appear on the internet. Maybe people not suffering from spam have similarly private addresses?

My main account is reachable from a few public places. I get spam but all of it goes to the spam folder and none of it to the inbox.

Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?

#94

Post by bashonly »

aceazzameen wrote: post #70

I'm having the opposite problem. I have a custom domain email address through a webhost, which gets forwarded to Gmail. I've been using Gmail as my client since day 1 (around whenever Gmail first came out). Some time in early summer I stopped getting emails from my wife, who uses a plain Gmail address. I was missing messages in threads if she was the sender. This has never happened before. So I checked the logs on th…

i used to have a custom domain email forwarded to gmail that would receive github notification emails and the same thing happened to me with those a couple months ago

Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?

#95

Post by dylan604 »

SyneRyder wrote: post #49
0___0 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

weeks? more like months. Yep, can't report them via SpamCop. I always report them via https://support.google.com/mail/contact/abuse?hl=en Not sure why they can't fix their crap.

Thank you! I somehow never came across that URL before. It's worth a try, though I'm not very optimistic it will help! I'd genuinely be interested to know from someone working at Google why Google can't / won't solve this, even for the narrow clearly-defined cases I see.

A) How much money does it cost Google to fix a problem?

B) How much money does it cost Google to not fix a problem?

If A > B then, duh!

Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?

#96

Post by soco »

55555 wrote: post #32
soco wrote: post #29

I constantly receive the same kind of gmail spam: there's a package for me. Half a year already, 3-4 a day, from random addresses like rp.6sgzBKV9UH@mail.4t2d3uxkxo.com / over corpegg.com whatever that is.

Do the emails contain links? 90% of spam filtering is checking if there's a link in the email. Spamming is easy if you don't need to include links, and the package spam often requests you call a phone number, which makes inboxing it trivial.

Yeah they have t.co links and look like any standard spam, yet I keep receiving them. Go go google filtering.

Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?

#97

Post by d23 »

I've been having the opposite problem. Things are going to my spam that are obviously not spam. The worst part is gmail automatically deletes after 30 days, with no way to configure that time period. I had to email some people recently to check whether they had reached out to me because I realized it probably went to spam (it did). Who knows how much other stuff I've missed.

Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?

#98

Post by mavhc »

enlyth wrote: post #10

To offer a singular data point, contrary to other posters here, I am not seeing this at all, and I pretty actively use my two Gmail addresses which have been active since 2005. My spam inbox regularly gets correctly categorized spam, and important emails still correctly land in my inbox.

99% fine here too

Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?

#99

Post by dmillar »

pexabit wrote: post #85
vmoore wrote: post #79

Migrated to Fastmail a few weeks ago. It's going swimmingly. The private addresses feature is brilliant. I can tell what service sold my address or leaked it, or otherwise gave it out somewhere against my consent. If Gmail allowed for private aliases it would thwart spam, but they won't implement it because they're anti-privacy.

You can always do "username+ @gmail.com" for this purpose. Doesn't help with privacy but tells you which service is leaking addresses.

fwiw, companies that are selling/giving away your email address are wise to this 'hack.'

Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?

#100

Post by dylan604 »

pexabit wrote: post #85
vmoore wrote: post #79

Migrated to Fastmail a few weeks ago. It's going swimmingly. The private addresses feature is brilliant. I can tell what service sold my address or leaked it, or otherwise gave it out somewhere against my consent. If Gmail allowed for private aliases it would thwart spam, but they won't implement it because they're anti-privacy.

You can always do "username+ @gmail.com" for this purpose. Doesn't help with privacy but tells you which service is leaking addresses.

>You can always do "username+@gmail.com"

Um, that's a solid maybe. Some services drop everything after the +. Some complain about it being not valid.

Use of the word always will pretty much always get you into a strange place

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