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

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

#101

Post by moosedev »

jmcphers wrote: post #46

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.

Same. I'd gotten out of the habit of checking my Spam folder, having trusted Gmail to get it "correct enough" for years. But I looked recently and was amazed/horrified how much legitimate email was in there, including a friend's birthday event invitation that I would otherwise have missed.

20% of what is in my "Spam" folder today is what I'd call "spam" in the classical 90s/2000s-internet sense. Obvious trash/scam stuff, usually sex-related.

Most of the rest of my "Spam" looks like what Gmail usually just labels Promotions. It's mail from legitimate organizations that I did indeed give my email address to and have a reasonable expectation of getting semi-regular email from, even if it's just trying to sell me more stuff. The Promotions auto-labeling works (worked) just fine for managing that stuff.

I figured enough users are clicking the "Spam" button on enough "legit promotional" email from real organizations that they did agree to receive email from, that Gmail just started classifying it all as spam, and now doesn't/can't distinguish between "classic" spam and "annoying emails I can't be bothered to unsubscribe from". Sort of a tragedy of the commons of crowd-sourced spam filtering. But maybe there's a better explanation.

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

#102

Post by tclancy »

Yes, I keep getting a bunch of “Your GEICO quote 1234” variations. My thought is spam is like weather fronts at this point: while it feels like that subject line should be obviously flagged up, there is probably some other storm of porn bot spam that is causing the machine learning or filters to bend in just such a way that the car insurance spam can seep through.

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

#103

Post by stepanhruda »

tclancy wrote: post #102

Yes, I keep getting a bunch of “Your GEICO quote 1234” variations. My thought is spam is like weather fronts at this point: while it feels like that subject line should be obviously flagged up, there is probably some other storm of porn bot spam that is causing the machine learning or filters to bend in just such a way that the car insurance spam can seep through.

I’m getting those too - and the content is an obvious low-res image, not sure how it’s getting through.

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

#105

Post by Twirrim »

I've been having a batch of really obvious spam getting past Hotmail's filtering. After years of Hotmail being bad, Microsoft got really good at spam filtering there and I haven't really had issues with spam for close on a decade. It rarely hits my inbox.

This last month, maybe two, I've had extremely obvious spam hit my inbox repeatedly. Picking two cases from today, the subject is the same "FWD: FINAL CALL", from two different senders, "A P P L E" and "NET FLIX". The pattern is pretty much always the same, it's immediately obvious that it's spam. No idea why it's slipping past when they're still catching hundreds a day (I've had this hotmail account from the early days of the platform, used it a bunch all over the place)

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

#106

Post by encoderer »

natch wrote: post #24
torben-friis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's good to hear, I can't find any mention about this problem anywhere and I was starting to think that I was being specifically targeted. Except for the last one, all the calls to action seem to be crypto related, but I don't know if that's relevant to the origin of this attack. Perhaps it's just the most successful way of getting clicks nowadays (?). It's baffling that google are letting these ones slip. Ev…

> It's baffling that google are letting these ones slip. Why would it be baffling? Google’s spam filters have always been extremely low quality, even mistaking email generated by Google itself as spam. They simply don’t have the pride of craftsmanship to improve it.

You live in a different universe than I do. Fascinating.

In my world, spam was a true problem that was killing email. Truly killing it. You would have to create a new address every 6 months to stay ahead of the spam and have a functioning inbox. Very different world.

Gmail fixed that. And for me, there have been issues from time to time and in fact i am getting this very spam myself, but gmail permanently stopped the hordes for me in 2004.

Now, don’t get me started on their insane categorization choices.

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

#107

Post by MrMember »

tclancy wrote: post #102

Yes, I keep getting a bunch of “Your GEICO quote 1234” variations. My thought is spam is like weather fronts at this point: while it feels like that subject line should be obviously flagged up, there is probably some other storm of porn bot spam that is causing the machine learning or filters to bend in just such a way that the car insurance spam can seep through.

I've been getting the same one. I mark each as spam but that doesn't seem to do anything.

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

#108

Post by seanw444 »

silisili wrote: post #80

Yes. I suddenly just started getting tons and tons of German spam. I tried Googling for a way to block mail in a language or from a country, but apparently the technology just isn't there to do so(/s). Getting rid of Russian and German mail would completely fix my spam problem.

Nah they'd have to develop a whole system that can automatically detect a text's language. For example, to recognize what language to translate to/from without having to be manually selected.

We're out of luck until then.

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

#109

Post by MrMember »

0xFreebie wrote: post #100

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.

Google will automatically add meeting invites to your calendar even if you don't accept them. You have to disable multiple options in both Gmail and Google calendar to stop this from happening. It is default behavior.
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