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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?

#261

Post by samstave »

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

I've posted/commented about it as well.

Interestingly, they can change the font of the subject lines which no valid email I have ever received in gmail has a subject with a different font.

That would be an interesting filter: if subject is !Font, then spam.

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

#262

Post by samstave »

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.

Now I am wondering if Google hasa disgruntled employee/rogue-agent in its midst's!

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

#264

Post by rocho »

samstave wrote: post #261
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

I've posted/commented about it as well. Interestingly, they can change the font of the subject lines which no valid email I have ever received in gmail has a subject with a different font. That would be an interesting filter: if subject is !Font, then spam.

I got a few of those myself. They use Unicode characters that look like ASCII letters and probably Google doesn't handle it well.

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

#265

Post by rocho »

stepanhruda wrote: post #103
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.

In the past week I got a bunch of obvious spam in my inbox. They all had a garbled subject line with numbers instead of letters, missing spaces and wrong capitalization, and the body was an image. It's crazy, how are they getting through? Maybe the filter gets thrown off by the unintelligible (to the machine, as a human can understand the meaning) subject line?

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

#267

Post by lytefm »

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.

Having opt-out instead of opt-in checkboxes is pretty much illegal in Europe and will get marketers banned from good emailing services.

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

#268

Post by lytefm »

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.

Yes, GMail is absolutely terrible on that regard. I've been missing out on project mails from an UN organisation I have been working and exchanging emails with because of their aggressive and useless filters.

For me privately, switching to a better provider solved that.

But having >25% GMail customers and always landing in Spam is horrible. Pretty much any other provider likes our mail server, but GMail always says spam.

Then you're going double opt-ins but customers still mark mails as spam because unsubscribing is too hard. Thanks for nothing.

There is actually an industry in gaming GMails spam filter to somehow get into the inbox: some offer automated replies and unmarking spam, some manually run hundreds of mailboxes and don't do anything else all day than unmarking mails as spam.

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

#269

Post by lytefm »

vgeek wrote: post #22
pmlnr wrote: post #8

Yet legitimate mail from my server with valid DKIM, DMARC, SPF, PTR record, decade old domain lands in spam. Good job, AI first Google/Gmail.

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.

Also, they want more people to use Gmail or GSuite. If that's the way to reach an Inbox on GMail, people simply choose the path of least resistance.

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

#270

Post by taftster »

KMnO4 wrote: post #198
taftster wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, exactly. I want my "promotions" to land square one in my inbox, because then I'm going to deal with them right then and there. Unsubscribe comes first. A filter comes next, if they keep sending.

Gmail has a “report spam and unsubscribe” button which I use liberally.

I feel guilty using it the first go. I figure I will click on their unsubscribe link first. And then I will click the report spam button if they continue to send me email

Unfortunately, all I'm probably doing is just confirming my email address to generate future "mailing list" subscriptions.

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