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Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?

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81–90 of 286 posts

Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?

#81
Yes, and I think it's related to an issue from earlier in July where gmail spam got way too strict.

Here's a thread where I walk through our hassle trying to get Gsuite support to try to acknowledge they even consider this an issue, let alone do something about it: https://twitter.com/JustinMcCammon/status/141761476919279206...

tldr; remove all bit.ly links from your emails

Google has massively messed up spam filters and we got confirmation that they are aware of the issue from Gsuite support (although it seemed like Google did not consider it a problem and was just the absolute worst to try to work with via support. Absolutely terrible at every interaction except one rep who had to fight the system to help us investigate).

We use Gsuite at work and ran into issues where in the middle of an email thread, with contacts we'd exchanged dozens of messages over many weeks and even months, suddenly the emails were being sent to our spam folder or worse, rejected entirely (which ends up being a silent failure unless you are really on top of your email logs or you have clients that pick up the phone and say "why haven't you responded to my email?" we had the latter).

We reach out and spent weeks going back and forth daily with Google "support". I'd spend hours on the phone with them going through steps to recreate it and trying to find workarounds. Aside from one good rep who acknowledged many other people were writing in about it at the same time we were it really seemed like Google could not care less.

At one point I got so desperate I searched on twitter to find other people complaining about things. I found a person who was willing to help me - she was on the other side of things - someone NOT using gmail trying to send emails to gmail users and getting the rejection bouncebacks all of a sudden. She helped me figure out some of the root causes. Turns out Google decided that all bit.ly links were bad and if one appeared in your email it was either rejected or sent to spam (we couldn't figure out why one or the other). With her help we figured out clear steps to reproduce the issue and I did so on emails I controlled to send all the email headers and such to Google thinking they would realize the obvious issue.

Turns out we had bit.ly links in our own company email signature and so what was happening is when a client would reply to our email and it would include our own signature in it then google would flag that email as bad.

In addition there were some cases where links to google docs or youtube (the irony!) were also getting flagged.

The only thing we did that worked was to set up custom exception rules in gsuite to always allow emails through that contained bit.ly links or gdoc links as well as turn off ALL spam filtering. Naturally we all got lots more spam but we also could get regular emails again, which was much appreciated.

I had a phone convo with someone at bit.ly since I figured they might like to know and maybe could apply some pressure to google but after running it up the ladder there they ghosted me.

Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?

#82

I have exactly the opposite problem: tons of legitimate email is getting flagged as Spam by GMail. It's now happening regularly with emails from people in my contacts with whom I regularly exchange messages . Mind-boggling. I know spam filtering is a hard problem, but these are just obvious misses.

This ^ see my comment about our experience fighting this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28636281

Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?

#83

For the last year or so I've noticed an increasing amount of my legitimate professional interactions going into my "Promotions" tab in Gmail. The effect of which has been, after discovering a few mishaps of this sort, to now regularly and meticulously go through a massive pile of "Promotions" just to make sure I haven't missed something legitimately urgent or important. Prior to Google's classification errors produci…

Just made an account to let you know that this specific comment made me check my Promotions tab, which happened to contain… an invitation to schedule a software engineering interview. Would definitely have missed that if I didn’t get bored and read this HN thread midway through my lecture.

Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?

#85

I have exactly the opposite problem: tons of legitimate email is getting flagged as Spam by GMail. It's now happening regularly with emails from people in my contacts with whom I regularly exchange messages . Mind-boggling. I know spam filtering is a hard problem, but these are just obvious misses.

GMail's spam filter no longer seems to have any intelligence. It's just a slider. Mark the obvious "Car insurance- 15324" subject message spam, and you know for a fact that immediately a bunch of legitimate mail will start getting flagged as spam. Mark that stuff as "not spam" and now you're back to getting obvious spam in your inbox.

Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?

#86
In my case, the spam that manages to evade Gmail's filters contain an image as the body instead of text.

Fun fact: Back in 2002 ycombinator founder Paul Graham wrote an article on spam filtering. (See http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html ). I emailed him that his method can be defeated by sending an image of the text, as opposed to the text itself. PG replied and pointed me to this FAQ: http://www.paulgraham.com/spamfaq.html

In the FAQ there is an entry named "What if spammers sent their messages as images?" The answer indicates that is not going to be an issue, because there's still plenty of signals to go by.

Guess PG was wrong!

Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?

#87
post #13

Yes, and don't forget to check your spam folder regularly because a bunch of legit email ends up in there too.

Thanks. Just found a bunch of legit emails. Perhaps HN needs a monthly banner that says: check your Spam folder for real email before it expires for this month!

Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?

#88
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just disable this filtering. It’s more damage than good nowadays…

Nowadays? Try day one. I always thought of this as a misfeature and disabled it from the start. I have no idea how this would be useful to me.

I get quite a bit of emails that are not completely spam, but by no means urgent to see. The filtering has been great to let me focus on things I need to see immediately, without having to scroll through 50 different promotional things

Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?

#89
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays? Try day one. I always thought of this as a misfeature and disabled it from the start. I have no idea how this would be useful to me.

For me, it's been the single greatest boost to email productivity. It works great 99%+ of the time for me where I only keep any eye on Updates and Primary, and maybe once a week clear out the Promotions tab. Forums and Social I can usually clear out without even looking. Interesting how people can have such different experiences.

sort of this: i treated the Promotions tab as a "unsubscribe from these mailing lists ASAP" tab as soon as the category feature came out

i get so few of them now i removed all those extra tabs and filters a year ago, but it was pretty useful to get my total inbox as clean as it is now :)

Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?

#90
I'll be the one to say no, I haven't had any spam in my inbox recently. No false positives either.

I find that every year or two there's a spammer that figures out a new technique and gets a couple of emails past the filter, but usually no more than a couple, and none recently. I don't see a trend toward less or more effectiveness of spam filtering overall.

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