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

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

#91

Post by taftster » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 10:23 PM UTC

jareklupinski wrote: post #89

dntrkv wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Right, exactly. I want my "promotions" to land square one in my inbox, because then I'm going to deal with them right then and there. Unsubscribe comes first. A filter comes next, if they keep sending.

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

#92

Post by wly_cdgr » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 10:24 PM UTC

Yup, definitely. It's a relatively new thing, and the stuff that's getting through looks more and more obviously like spam

Very weird to see the spam filter be obviously and dramatically worse than it was 10 years ago. Are they about to move to a paid model for Gmail? Hehe

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

#93

Post by wizzwizz4 » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 10:24 PM UTC

dntrkv wrote: post #69

taftster wrote: post #62

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.

Classical AI (i.e. manually-constructed email rules) is much better for this kind of thing, in my experience. You don't get spurious false positives; you can predict every false positive in your head before you even get the email, and if you want you can even add an extra rule to prevent it from happening in the first place!

“Unknown / trusted / spam senders” lists are a basic implementation of this concept.

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

#94

Post by Tommah » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 10:26 PM UTC

Funny story: A week ago, I received an email from a website monitoring service saying that my site was up. I wondered for a second why I didn't get an email saying that my site had been down first. Eventually I realized that I probably did get it, but it went into my Gmail spam. Sure enough, I checked my spam folder, and there it was.

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

#95

Post by d0gsg0w00f » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 10:28 PM UTC

gtirloni wrote: post #79

skinkestek wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is company mail you might have a colleague who uses the spam button instead of delete. I once caught my boss doing this (he was not a native English speaker, but absolutely used to communicating in English so it shocked me.)

Hmm so this is indeed a thing. I operate some email servers and often get spam notifications from, say, Hotmail, and the emails are always legitimate. It's like some people don't bother unsubscribing from lists, they just start reporting it as spam hoping it will go away.

I used to be naive and actually unsubscribe from things but it stopped working about 10 years ago so I haven't bothered since.

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

#96

Post by tayo42 » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 10:28 PM UTC

I wish recruiter emails counted as spam. Honestly don't why they don't. Some can't be bothered to include my name.

No, No one wants to live in Arkansas doing contract to hire for $30/hour working on some windows mess.

This is just junk mail

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

#97

Post by jeffbee » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 10:28 PM UTC

Best thing you can do is just hit the spam report button and wait. Spammers do occassionally get their hands on clean IPs or networks, and someone has to get the messages in their inbox for the crowdsourcing to work.

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

#98

Post by remus » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 10:28 PM UTC

upofadown wrote: post #76

vgeek wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is to say that it isn't working as intended in building a higher wall around their ad garden? There should be a way for them to accept mail from self hosted users, or even provide some sort of testing tools (perhaps validated by credit card some type of bar to increase accountability? At least an RBL or something) for those who do, but nope.

I am beginning to think that the simplest explanation is the most likely one. Google is just bad at stuff... If this was all part of some clever conspiracy then it would be, well, more clever...

Or more simple still, it's a hard problem to solve and when there's billions of emails flowing through the pipeline every hour small mistakes can look big to individual users.

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

#99

Post by LudwigNagasena » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 10:31 PM UTC

gtirloni wrote: post #79

skinkestek wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is company mail you might have a colleague who uses the spam button instead of delete. I once caught my boss doing this (he was not a native English speaker, but absolutely used to communicating in English so it shocked me.)

Hmm so this is indeed a thing. I operate some email servers and often get spam notifications from, say, Hotmail, and the emails are always legitimate. It's like some people don't bother unsubscribing from lists, they just start reporting it as spam hoping it will go away.

If a button is hard to find or it doesn't directly unsubcribe me, I just report the email as spam.

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

#100

Post by 0xFreebie » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 10:32 PM UTC

I've recently had the experience of getting a spam email that allowed the spammer to add an appointment to my Google Calendar without my permission - even though I never enabled such a feature, never communicated with the sender before, and didn't reply or star or have them in my contacts. Wtf.