Gmail marking email from me as spam • Hacker News Board

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#251

Post by pwinnski » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 3:32 PM UTC

"It is always better to let the possible spam go through than to filter out something that is not spam."

Spoken like an email sender, not an email receiver.

I'm deeply sympathetic with the sender, and not inclined to defend Google here, but I'm also aware that Google is a very large target with a lot of bad actors specifically targeting them, and I just checked my spam folder in gmail: wow!

The problem here is spammers, and a communication system that assumes good faith on the part of senders. Gmail is choosing one way of trying to counteract that problem which is causing problems for people in certain IP blocks, and that sucks. But the problem is still spammers, not Google.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#252

Post by gm » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 3:41 PM UTC

mav3rick wrote: post #211

natch wrote: post #165

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…

You don't understand the scale of this problem. It's such a fad to "fire" someone because you think "it's an easy problem".

I think it should suffice to know that after one repeatedly trains the google spam filter with "report not spam" and "mark as spam", it should learn that well enough, no?

As an example: Some dumb ass Verizon customer gave them my email address as their own. I got a ton of communications from Verizon that I could not turn off (bill past due, thank you for you promise to pay, and all sorts of really annoying messages). I called Verizon, I was told that neither them nor I could do anything about it because I did not own the Verizon account, and I did not have the account PIN. Their official solution for this problem: Mark all the Verizon emails as spam and don't call them again (I kid you not).

The result: I marked about 100 Verizon emails as spam and Gmail learned that really well; now I do not see Verizon emails in my inbox. Why TF can't gmail do this with all the other emails I mark as spam and not spam?

I just got in the habit of firing up the hideous gmail app on my phone to go through my spam folder every day and vet out the non-spam out of there. I usually go though about 250 emails per day. I end up looking at all the spam, but it's far faster to fish out the good messages from spam than if I turned spam detection off altogether.

No matter how complex the problem to solve is, Google is failing at a level where even I could program it better, which is not a high bar at all.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#253

Post by gm » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 3:46 PM UTC

kalleboo wrote: post #102

xxs wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>2. You're using Tor or a VPN? Here's 10 reCaptcha's. I get recapthca ALL the time for just not being logged on and deleting all filthy cookies on exit; and not "honoring" 3rd party cookies at all... and I don't care. Best part is that if you live in a country you don't speak the language you get google services in one of the country official languages -- so what you should do and mark is often unclear. The next best…

I was getting really long and annoying recaptcha all the time, presumably because I use Safari which has all that anti-tracking stuff. But lately (past 2-3 months?) I only get a single challenge, I wonder if they've found a way around the protection or if they've just changed the model

OMG, me too, and all I did was to tighten up cookies (disable 3rd party trackers, erase all cookies on close, etc).

Now I've got a PhD on solving "traffic light" and "crosswalk" Captchas as a result.

I started to resent Google for this, except now I think twice before going to a web site that will give me these hurdles, so it ended up helping me to focus on my work. Now I appreciate the extra work.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#254

Post by fastaguy88 » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 3:47 PM UTC

It's not just gmail. When my university went to office365 mail for faculty, pretty much all of my email from the upper administration (e.g. the president of the university) was marked as junk. I complained, but there were no solutions.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#255

Post by Mediterraneo10 » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 3:59 PM UTC

luckylion wrote: post #137

em-bee wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but what if email is the only way to reach you? so i got a notification that you didn't get the email. fine. i still have no way to talk to you unless i sign up to some other email service and try it again. depending on the reason to email you, i may not care enough. (maybe i wanted to buy your service) if a customer emails me and i don't respond because i didn't get the email, i have a problem, not the customer. the…

> but what if email is the only way to reach you? I have no idea if it actually is, but it might be a legal issue too in some jurisdictions. German law for example requires commercial sites to have an option for quick and electronic communication - Email is generally a valid choice. If your mail server rejects incoming mail (be it because it's overly sensitive, offline, or you never bothered setting it up etc), that…

Wouldn’t a simple contact form on a website meet the definition of quick and electronic communication?

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#256

Post by jedberg » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 4:03 PM UTC

Because of this post I checked my gmail spam folder for the first time in months. Of the 429 messages, 8 were not spam, which honestly is kind of a high false positive rate.

Incidentally, two messages from Google themselves were correctly marked as spam, in that they were advertising for services that I didn't care about.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#257

Post by fastball » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 4:04 PM UTC

progval wrote: post #206

fastball wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but in this case Google isn't being evil. Do you really thing Google wants to intentionally stop your innocuous emails from getting to your mail box? Why in the world would they want that?

Possibly to get you to use Gmail instead of self-hosting. (Note: I have no proof they actively want that, I'm just speculating)

The fact that Google emails get caught in Gmail spam should make it clear that such speculation is completely unwarranted.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#258

Post by c3534l » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 4:06 PM UTC

rapind wrote: post #199

the_pwner224 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm not defending gmail, but I will say that some users simply suck (unintentionally). I bet some of your peers are just hitting the spam button instead of simply deleting the email, generating a bad reputation for the sender. I've seen this with my SaaS. We ONLY send transactional emails like purchase receipts and login links (using postmark). We're very intentional about not sending anything remotely resembling mar…

It might be because the service sends both spam emails and legitimate emails. Many (maybe even most) sites do this. If this person is getting a thousand emails over the course of a few years, how on Earth are all of those legitimate, especially when they've only replied to a handful of them, implying the majority of emails can oe safely ignored.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#259

Post by LeonM » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 4:09 PM UTC

throwaway2048 wrote: post #228

mav3rick wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"pretty much an optimal way".

Believe it or not, its possible to carefully look into things and check them, but I understand its much easier to be smug and assume that its my fault.

Judging by your username I don't expect you to share the domain name here, but if you need a second opinion, send me a PM and I'll analyse the domain for you.

There is usually some misconfiguration somewhere that goes overlooked. Happens to the best of us :-)

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#260

Post by carloswilson » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 4:10 PM UTC

Prior to GMail, we used to check our "Junk" folder occasionally in whatever email service we used.

When GMail arrived with its nice spam classification, it was great. Worked well, better than any competitors out there. This gradually conditioned us to ignore the "Spam" directory completely. Now things have moved to the opposite extreme. It is quite difficult to host independent email servers and send emails from it without GMail classifying it as spam. The high false-positive rate has become the norm. Instead of GMail trying to reduce the false-positive rate, it has now become the responsibility of those hosting email servers to jump through the hoops to ensure that their emails are not classified as spam.

Makes one think: If we knew what we know today about spam and abuse of Internet services, would SMTP have been designed the way it is designed today? What fundamental design change could have made it immune to spam? Perhaps a pull-based design instead of push-based? Perhaps something even cleverer?