I have also gotten this emails this last couple of weeks.
Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?
241–250 of 286 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?
#242In 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…
>Guess PG was wrong!
I mean, he wasn't wrong. He was describing the state of spam at the time.
The way I see it, you were trying to corner him into giving the answer you wanted, and he was trying to corner you into asking the question that would force him to give the answer you wanted.
All machine learning models make intrinsic assumptions about their input distribution (no free lunch theorem and all that). If all your objection was that the model will fail to work if the assumptions it makes about the input distribution will fail to hold, that is a criticism for the entire field of machine learning, not this one spam-filtering product.
Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?
#243Earlier 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.
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Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?
#244Yep, plenty of new spam that's passing Gmail's spam filters. I'm seeing variations on a common format:
From: seemingly.real.name@gmail.com To: several apparently real Gmail addresses Subject: (no subject) Blank body apparently, PDF attached which the web and mobile previews indicate is of a pretty young woman, possibly porn (I've not opened any).
Another variation, the same as above with random words as the subject, such as "shallop escape clause unfilled orders crockitude". This is an actual example from my inbox.
Another, same again, but with nonsense in the subject and body, e.g. "48046256 of hlbezmy". Actual example again. I noticed that the preview image of the PDF in this example has a yellow-green tinge, possibly an attempt to disguise flesh-tones?
And so on. And on, and on, and on. It smacks of a very deliberate, industrial scale approach either at training the filters, or at exploiting weak spots that have already been discovered.
As another commenter has pointed out, this spam really does feel like 90s spam all over again. This made me wonder, is it possible that 90s-flavour spam is a result of 90s-flavour filters falling out of favour and being dropped or becoming under-trained? Are we doomed to endless cycles of spam revivals?
Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?
#245I've been getting these for a couple of months too. I don't speak Russian so I just picked a couple of common Cyrillic characters and created a filter that dumps any email with any such character in the spam folder. What's more annoying than the emails is that I'm getting Google drive documents shared with me with in a similar format from Russian senders. There doesn't seem to be a way to block or spam sort Google dr…
Yes, recently I was getting notifications on my Android phone from Google Docs. Requests to approve doc edits or similar, but very obviously spammy. They seem to have stopped now.
Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?
#246My wife is having huge problems launching her business because gmail keeps eating her incoming and outgoing emails at random. It is really tough finding reliable email w/ support since Yahoo and Google turned it into a loss leader. If you felt a blast of cold today it was because I suggested she look at Office 365 since so could get support, and I think that put out hell’s pilot light.
Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?
#247Earlier 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…
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
Same with me, been happening for a couple of weeks now. Sometimes multiple times a day. Just yesterday I had the following:
Title: V10 YU L2 RUO T778 ZRD
Sender: Тельман Кудряшов sefovuz@gmail.com
Body: 3484 2 0812 61 3
Attachment: Blockchain Prizes 3883 .htm
Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?
#248I am not in the US. i am getting spam from prominent US senators ("Nancy Pelosi Headquarters <info@pactothefutur) to donate to them through some click.ngpvan.com* links . it's only happened this month
Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?
#249They're just using plain text a lot & very watered down language.
Re: Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?
#250I'm receiving some spam emails in the inbox folder since spring. They are clearly spam.
I analized 2 arrived this morning: both have 2 message-id header, one from gmail the other from sendgrid; both have a in-reply-to header (that is used for ARC and DKIM signature); both have 2 DKIM-Signature... both have the same CaMelCasE html... both are flagged as spam by a corporate antispam and my own spamassassin... one message has fake Received: headers with date in year 2019...
gmail has all the information to mark them as spam