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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?

#121

Post by danielheath »

moosedev wrote: post #101
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 st…

I carefully look for “subscribe to news” checkboxes and always untick them; if you send me campaign emails without me explicitly opting in you are getting a spam flag, whether or not I gave you an address for transactional mail.

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

#122

Post by actinium226 »

Yes, I get the exact same thing, Russian sender, some weird code in the subject line and some sort of attachment. I guess they found a way past the spam filter. I just report spam and I'm sure Google will update their algorithm to catch these things.

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

#123

Post by danielheath »

Twirrim wrote: post #105

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 t…

Yeah, I have had tons get past the Fastmail filters too. And a huge uptick in sms/autodialler spam to my phone.

If all the bigger providers are having trouble too, perhaps there’s a new kind of spam? Or higher monetary incentives now?

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

#125

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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.

I've never understood why Gmail and Hotmail/Live/Outlook don't take a user's own indications as gospel. If I whitelist an email address I want those messages, I don't care if [you think, perhaps erroneously] they are spam.

Possibly the worst is not allowing replys. I mean if a customer sends me a message, and you block the reply as spam how is that serving that customer? Sure mark it, remove viruses, obfuscate links, but let me reply to someone!

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

#126

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

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.

> It's like some people don't bother unsubscribing from lists, they just start reporting it as spam hoping it will go away.

I do that all the time. I consider every list I didn't explicitly and intentionally subscribe to as spam and treat them accordingly. I wish I wouldn't have to do that but I find subscribing someone to a list when they thought they were just buying or creating an account for a product so unnerving and disrespectful that I don't feel bad about it.

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

#127

Post by pbhjpbhj »

er4hn wrote: post #114
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.

Different teams for the inbox and spam folder in a single app? Sounds like the sort of thing one person would manage.

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

#128

Post by moosedev »

danielheath wrote: post #121
moosedev wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

I carefully look for “subscribe to news” checkboxes and always untick them; if you send me campaign emails without me explicitly opting in you are getting a spam flag, whether or not I gave you an address for transactional mail.

Not sure if you meant political campaign emails specifically or marketing campaign emails in general. The former are some of the absolute worst offenders in that regard, for sure.

I try to use unsubscribe links when 1) they exist and 2) the email is from a legit organization that I reasonably believe is actually going to unsubscribe me from something (if not from every place they've copied my address to by now), but I can see the argument for just flagging as spam in the case where an organization oversteps previously agreed bounds. Especially with the political campaign emails, the unsubscribe game can feel like futile whack-a-mole.

For ordinary commercial campaigns, I'd worry that flagging as spam would cause legit transactional mail (i.e. mail that belongs in the Updates auto-label) from the same organization to get flagged as well, but based on the state of my Spam folder, that's already happening anyway...

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

#129

Post by ct0 »

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.

same here, russian text, many recipiants. Spam blocking does nothing.

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

#130

Post by jez »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #93
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.

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.

This is why Inbox's Bundles feature was amazing. User-defined rules, emails either show up live or in digest form throughout the day, shown in your (one) inbox, not in some panel where secondary "labels" or "folders" are relegated to. Collapsed by default, but expandable.

Gmail thought that adding Snooze was enough to get feature parity and kill Inbox, but Bundles were by far the feature keeping me on Inbox.

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