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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?

#111

Post by steanne »

seanw444 wrote: post #108
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.

oh no, they have it. i know they do: i get a lot of spam in french because of my user name, and not much else on that account. i recently had legit email in english be flagged as spam and gmail had a "why is this message marked spam?" note on it that said it was not in my usual language.

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

#112

Post by ALittleLight »

NavinF wrote: post #49

Yep, got one 3 days ago that matches your description perfectly. Russian sender name, HTML attachment about Elon/Bitcoin, etc. Maybe these emails are coming from real users that got hacked? That's probably the easiest way to get past the filter.

I wonder if they could have their bots email one another a lot and continually mark their messages as "not spam" until the Google system learns to trust them.

I have also been getting several of these super obvious spam mail messages recently.

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

#113

Post by schappim »

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...

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity", except for the "promotions tab", that was clear malice to increase their ads revenue.

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

#114

Post by er4hn »

browningstreet wrote: post #110

Gmail's Chat now has a feature to forward an individual message to your inbox. I kept clicking on that feature and all the forwards from Google were in the Gmail Spam folder. Gargh.

That just sounds like poor cooperation between teams.

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

#116

Post by alister »

I don't have a direct answer to your question, but I want to suggest a possible solution. I've been getting almost no spam for the last 10+ years even though I don't use any spam filtering (neither in my email client nor with my email service provider).

What I did was to switch from Gmail to a paid email provider. Then I started giving every single business a unique email alias, though my friends all get the same email alias. Currently I have 370 active aliases. I've had to disable only 20 aliases in the whole decade which works out to only about 5% of my contacts.

As I said, I use no spam filtering whatsoever, so I find it amazing that Gmail users with spam filtering have such a different experience.

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

#117

Post by fay59 »

remus wrote: post #98
upofadown wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same as with gaming search, it’s possible that spammers are catching up with the Google smarts, and from this point it’s unclear how to proceed.

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

#118

Post by gerdesj »

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.

You could use a full fat client eg Thunderbird or Evolution, Outlook or whatever and use that to do some filtering through an IMAP connection. However that does rather negate the convenience.

You could also try another provider or DIY. Another option is something like Mimecast which you put in front of Gmail - https://www.mimecast.com/products/platform-selection/mimecas...

If you use a mass email provider, you get a rather generic experience. How on earth are Goog n co supposed to work out what you consider to be spam or UBE? I imagine that you get some basic filters (naughty words and a few IP deny lists) and a tokenizer n bayesian classifier that does the really hard work. Keep tagging the crap mail as spam and after a while it should learn, that for you: German - probably unwanted, Cyrillic - probably unwanted etc. Unfortunately you don't get to see under the hood/bonnet to understand what is actually going on.

I recommend that you stick with manually notifying spam for a while and see if that works - you need a lot of samples. If Goog allows you mark ham then use that too but I suspect they implicitly mark a mail as ham if you don't mark it as spam. When I say a lot of samples, I think you need at least 200 ham and 200 spam samples minimum, ideally 500 each and the more the better. Moving to another mass mail supplier will almost certainly not help.

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

#119

Post by j_walter »

MrMember wrote: post #107
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.

Same. I'm getting the ones as OP and the Geico ones...mark as spam, more show up within a day or two.
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