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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?

#91

Post by Marsymars »

sbrother wrote: post #40
randerson wrote: post #37

It's a great reminder of how good this feature is that we take for granted. I think this outage has actually improved my appreciation for Gmail (a service I normally only complain about).

Seriously. I didn't even realize this was a wide issue, but I couldn't find a school enrolment email I was looking for this morning, and found it in the spam folder. The fact that I basically never have to do this is actually amazing.

I wonder about difference in experience that different people have with gmail’s spam filter. In my case, the majority of emails that go to my gmail spam folder are legitimate. I don’t actually receive much spam, a single-digit number of emails per month (in the past 30 days, 2 emails), so any time I see anything in my spam folder I have to check so that I can rescue the email if legitimate.

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

#92

Post by Marsymars »

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 did a “reset” a few years ago where I moved to a fresh gmail address, forwarded my old one, and updated all my accounts to use Apple’s Hide My Email service, unique per sender.

After a few years of updating addresses that I’d missed whenever something showed up that was forwarded from my old gmail account, I shut down my old account.

No more spam, whenever I start receiving spam to a Hide My Email address, I deactivate it.

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

#93

Post by Marsymars »

DANmode wrote: post #66
B1FIDO wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Spammers, if minorly sophisticated, can strip those identifiers, so wildcard mail acceptance on servicename@customdomain.com takes the crown if you’re setting this up fresh!

I did a wildcard acceptance for years, but it doesn’t scale as well something like Apple’s Hide My Email (or other comparable service) - with a catchall you have to then start keeping a blacklist of bad emails, and I started getting spam to generic addresses like info@customdomain.com or admin@customdomain.com - with @icloud.com addresses you can just delete an address and forget about it once it’s burned.

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

#94

Post by Marsymars »

tianqi wrote: post #74
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You don’t need an email service provider for that, plenty of DNS providers also offer email forwarding. I can recommend easyDNS, but various others are probably also good.

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

#95

Post by smt88 »

chr15m wrote: post #87
samrus wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah i have fantasies of having my own email server and stuff but the spam detection is probably the 3rd thing that would have me crawling back

I have run my own mail server for years and I rarely see spam. I'm running a classic Bayesian filter as outlined in the legendary PG post "A Plan For Spam" and it works very well. I don't really get all the fuss about this issue. When I do see a piece of unclassified spam I simply classify it and continue. For me this is a far better tradeoff than having all my most private mail on some bigcorp server where any nerd…

> For me this is a far better tradeoff than having all my most private mail on some bigcorp server where any nerd can rifle through it.

You've functionally given yourself very little extra privacy because the vast majority of emails you send or receive will still cross through BigCorp servers (whether Google, Microsoft, Intuit, or other).

You can do the work to run your own mail server, but so few other people do that one end of the conversation is still almost always feeding a corporation's data lake.

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

#96

Post by DANmode »

SoftTalker wrote: post #80
DANmode wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Neither do they - until hours after you’ve potentially received a spam message in your inbox.

It’s past patterns + live human weighting.

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

#97

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

maxbond wrote: post #90
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

I agree with you but for the love of the game, these are the ones I'm guessing are spam: * Paul, can we have a zoom meeting with you on Monday? * Assistance for donation * Greetings!!! * Invite Connection * Refund request

3/5 :)

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

#99

Post by wizzwizz4 »

smt88 wrote: post #95
chr15m wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have run my own mail server for years and I rarely see spam. I'm running a classic Bayesian filter as outlined in the legendary PG post "A Plan For Spam" and it works very well. I don't really get all the fuss about this issue. When I do see a piece of unclassified spam I simply classify it and continue. For me this is a far better tradeoff than having all my most private mail on some bigcorp server where any nerd…

> For me this is a far better tradeoff than having all my most private mail on some bigcorp server where any nerd can rifle through it. You've functionally given yourself very little extra privacy because the vast majority of emails you send or receive will still cross through BigCorp servers (whether Google, Microsoft, Intuit, or other). You can do the work to run your own mail server, but so few other people do tha…

And yet, if you're communicating with someone else who does the same (or uses a niche hosted provider), that entire conversation is outside their "data lake".

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

#100

Post by p-e-w »

sbrother wrote: post #40
randerson wrote: post #37

It's a great reminder of how good this feature is that we take for granted. I think this outage has actually improved my appreciation for Gmail (a service I normally only complain about).

Seriously. I didn't even realize this was a wide issue, but I couldn't find a school enrolment email I was looking for this morning, and found it in the spam folder. The fact that I basically never have to do this is actually amazing.

They probably have a trillion emails with human labels, either from users directly applying them, or inferrable from actions like deleting.

With that much data, even a simple Bayesian classifier should work pretty much perfectly.

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