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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?

#181

Post by dfdz »

lunatuna wrote: post #140

I have two accounts with google, one is personal and the other is through work. My personal account is pretty clean and rarely does anything get through that shouldn't. Occasionally I find something in the spam filter that shouldn't be there, usually password resets. My work account is seeing a big increase in "professional" spam. "Hey Guy, did you see my last email I sent . . .", "Hey Guy, we are the top network sec…

I’ve also been getting subtle professional spam consisting of very short emails, something like:

from: kate.random.but.reasonable.name38 @ gmail . com

Sorry for the delay, here is my email.

Best, Kate

Sometimes they are more obviously spam, but other times it seems nearly impossible for a spam filter to stop, like the example I provided.

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

#182

Post by pensatoio »

After almost a decade of near zero spam with gmail, I'm getting these weirdly obvious spam emails for various kinds of insurance where the whole email is composed of photos containing the text. I'm frustrated that they keep coming in despite reporting all of them as spam. Surely this is obvious spam.

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

#183

Post by pensatoio »

flowerlad wrote: post #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/spamf…

Exactly the same issue here.

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

#184

Post by dripton »

uclastudent1000 wrote: post #83
im_down_w_otp wrote: post #21

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.

Life pro tip: most recruiters can't write emails that look like they came from humans rather than spambots. If you're actively looking for a job, check all your spam folders daily. I can't tell you how many actual job leads have ended up in mine.

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

#185

Post by radlad »

torben-friis wrote: post #5
filleokus wrote: post #2

YES! I posted about this two weeks ago, one person agreed but the post never got any traction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28437472 I haven't heard anything about this when I asked colleagues / IRL friends... I wonder what is going on over at Google

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…

I've also been getting the crypto spam in my inbox, usually as one of a ton of recipients. e.g:

Title: Rc 2 Xq 1677 Riyw 532

Sender: Чеслав Сальников

Body: 3688 867 8383 4 3 784

Attachment: Free Bitcoin - DELL .html

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

#187

Post by ImprovedSilence »

I very much have been. For maybe the past few years. I'm not sure if it's because I've been using mail less and less over time and their algos not keeping up cuz I never read anything, or spam blocking is just getting worse, period..

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

#188

Post by jccalhoun »

yes. I have been getting russian language spam in my main inbox for a week or so. I don't know russian.

However, even weirder is a series of emails I've been getting for nearly a month now. They are always from randomized emails and claim to be different people but they are always about someone named Becca and some guy. Sometimes they are accusing me of being this guy and harassing Becca. Sometimes they are saying someone stole Becca's phone and was impersonating her friends. The weird thing is that none of these have any links.

Here's one from yesterday: "Beverly hacked all your stuff made fake account of you on Facebook apparently you have a new house and going to hurt Becca if she doesn't stay away from you . Apparently according to the rude message Becca Lynn received y'all aren't friends anymore ... That made Becca cry " But there aren't any links or anything like I would expect if it was typical phishing emails. Maybe they are just sending things out hoping someone will respond?

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

#189

Post by MrWiffles »

Just another reason to ditch Google all together. I've been using Fastmail (paid, happily so) with my own domain for about 4 years now, and have been gradually changing all my online accounts that were using my gmail.com address to my own domain. Reduces Google's surveillance abilities (to some extent) and I don't have this problem at all.

Also, I use a desktop email client (Spark on MacOS) with IMAP/SMTP. Massive improvement over any webmail client, especially GMail.

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

#190

Post by natch »

bwy wrote: post #166
natch wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Gmail fixed that. Hardly. They didn't invent the tech. And they didn't perfect it. They haven't even tried. The evidence is in my Spam folder. I mean they mark messages they themselves originate as dangerous spam. "Dangerous" being their word, not mine. Screenshot from within the last hour: https://imgur.com/IjQUGaY I was in that earlier world too. They papered the problem over, a little. But no, they didn't fix it.

Just curious if you would post a little more of the screenshot? I don't think there's enough in the image for me to tell if it's from a spam address or not.

It’s from Google.

The return address is:

Google Alerts - googlealerts-noreply (at) google.com

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