Yep the person in charge of this at Google should be fired. And I say this as someone who has no reliance on or use of outbound email marketing whatsoever. In other words, I’m not an embittered emailer who thinks their email is being unfairly treated as spam. I’m just a user who sometimes looks in the spam folder and is aghast at some of the false positives Google has. And yes some of the false negatives in the inbox…
Gmail marking email from me as spam
211–220 of 407 posts
Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam
#212I would argue in this narrow case - I would not point to nefarious undercurrents. Google's ML mail spam models are that way because there's too many bad actors. Email, even in 2019, still extremely valuable. If you can get into people's email inbox, there's still quite high conversion rate - better than clicks/videos on a pure percentage basis. Even the author wants to reach out to people in a cold fashion. As a gmai…
> Google's ML mail spam models are that way because there's too many bad actors. Email, even in 2019, still extremely valuable. Google's spam models freaking suck donkey dick. I use Fastmail but my university uses Google for email. A service we use (Piazza, class Q&A) sends notifications via email. Over the years I have gotten probably about 1k email notifications from them, and replied to a few of them too. Google h…
Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rarely have I seen such concise and respectful way of describing the typical rants I see on HN way to often, bravo! I can only wish I had your writing skills. > It's insulting to the folks that are pouring their time replying to what they think is a user in need of technical assistance, only to eventually stop replying when it becomes obvious that he only replies with questions of morality and treats most answers as…
This is essentially HN with every single Google related post nowadays. Good or bad, people hate Google, they hate it the way they used to hate Microsoft, they see everything it does as being nefarious. People ignore the email spammers, SEO spammers, automated password crackers and blame google for the solutions they put in place to combat those things. It's impossible to reason with them, honestly I think it's just b…
Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam
#214That said, if you read far down enough in the thread, it's pretty clear that the OP has very, very unrealistic expectations about others' obligations to him, and very incorrect notions about how statistics work. The argument eventually turns to "well google has a lot of processing power at its disposal so I don't see why it can't use this in order to turn incomplete data into more complete data" and that's when I checked out :\
Edit: also this Brandon Long has the patience of a saint.
Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rarely have I seen such concise and respectful way of describing the typical rants I see on HN way to often, bravo! I can only wish I had your writing skills. > It's insulting to the folks that are pouring their time replying to what they think is a user in need of technical assistance, only to eventually stop replying when it becomes obvious that he only replies with questions of morality and treats most answers as…
This is essentially HN with every single Google related post nowadays. Good or bad, people hate Google, they hate it the way they used to hate Microsoft, they see everything it does as being nefarious. People ignore the email spammers, SEO spammers, automated password crackers and blame google for the solutions they put in place to combat those things. It's impossible to reason with them, honestly I think it's just b…
I have my mailserver configured in pretty much an optimal way, with all the special bells and whistles, have never sent spam, and never will.
Gmail refuses to deliver my mail, so please don't lump me in with malicious people and then say my concerns should just be ignored.
Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam
#216I would argue in this narrow case - I would not point to nefarious undercurrents. Google's ML mail spam models are that way because there's too many bad actors. Email, even in 2019, still extremely valuable. If you can get into people's email inbox, there's still quite high conversion rate - better than clicks/videos on a pure percentage basis. Even the author wants to reach out to people in a cold fashion. As a gmai…
Instead of just blocking bad actors why not work to prevent bad actors from being a problem in the first place?
Oh right, it would go against their business model.
Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the consequence of the spam filters doing a good job. I too remember when consumers would clamour for better spam detections and different companies would hawk products that purported to do so. But now that spam detection mostly works well for most people, it’s a forgotten issue. Now we have people on this thread questioning Google’s authority to filter spam because from their PoV, Google isn’t adding much va…
The problem is that Google errs too much on the it-is-spam side. Having to delete a few spam mails isn't a big issue if the alternative is losing legitimate mails because of overzealous filters.
Imagine your grandma getting phishing emails from banks. If only 1% goes through, because Google is a bit more lenient on the detection, I can see the phishing success rate going through the roof.
It's a very hard problem to solve.
Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam
#218The email landscape is substantially more complex now than it was three decades ago. The poster seems to be frustrated that he is mostly getting technical explanations to his rather emotionally fueled question. He is literally phishing for an argument on the morals of a big company deciding he is a potential spammer without absolute proof. He made it clear that his opinion is that there should be a system in place at…
The common thread among many of the bad-Google stories I've seen in the last 10 years is that Google has made a deliberate decision to not give two shits if they accidentally hurt a small minority of their users. People get messages out of the blue that essentially say "We've just wiped out your email account, we're not telling you why and there's no one you can appeal to." I don't know if this particular guy is on the level or not, but it's not credible that all of these people are secretly spammers and scammers. Occasionally you can get things fixed if you know someone at Google or your complaint goes viral, but that's your only option.
I'm sure someone at Google did some math and concluded that the ill will of a few customers costs less than maintaining a support department. That's not an excuse. I don't think we should expect Google to never make mistakes, but we should absolutely expect some avenue to correct those mistakes.
Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam
#219Google's making us play by their rules: 1. Our ML models see that your emails spam? You're spam. 2. You're using Tor or a VPN? Here's 10 reCaptcha's. 3. Don't use Google Webmaster or use AMPs? Good luck finding your page on the 1st page. 4. Youtube video includes education hacking tutorials? Demonetized. Obviously some alternatives are moving to Fastmail and using Duck Duck Go, but we need Google to stop this "my way…
Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think OP stop replying, he seems pretty active on another thread of the same mailing list concerning another big player (MSFT) filtering out some messages for some reasons. https://www.mail-archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg09066.html As a hobbit* , I'm actually pretty happy this whole conversation is starting to gain more traction. My domain is always green on every test I could run (mailtester.com & all) yet…
Even after reading that, I'm not sure what an email hobbit is. Someone who just wants to live in a cozy hole in the ground with a few nice email amenities?