Because they are junk, in the wast amount of cases.
At least I consider them as such.
Ask HN: Why are OOO autoreplies ever marked as junk?
11–14 of 14 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why are OOO autoreplies ever marked as junk?
#12I suspect it has something to do with the fact that they're all written in a pretty similar way, and, over time, you'll tend to get a good number of them. Large numbers of similar sounding messages seems like a pretty good spam signal to me.
But why isn't this spam signal overridden by the fact that I just emailed this guy? What are the odds that I happened to email a spammer? I know it seems silly to care so much about OOOs, but I actually do want to know when someone will be back in the office, and whom I should contact in the meantime for urgent matters.
Everything I've said here, including my initial comment, was just speculation. But, if I had to speculate further, I'd guess it's because spam detectors tend not to be terribly advanced. I wouldn't expect it to consider the temporal signal of "just emailed this guy and immediately got a response back," nor would I expect it to parse the headers and check times.
Honestly, you'd probably have to actually talk to somebody at Google who works on or has worked on Gmail in order to get a real answer.
Re: Ask HN: Why are OOO autoreplies ever marked as junk?
#13I suspect it has something to do with the fact that they're all written in a pretty similar way, and, over time, you'll tend to get a good number of them. Large numbers of similar sounding messages seems like a pretty good spam signal to me.
But why isn't this spam signal overridden by the fact that I just emailed this guy? What are the odds that I happened to email a spammer? I know it seems silly to care so much about OOOs, but I actually do want to know when someone will be back in the office, and whom I should contact in the meantime for urgent matters.
Your outgoing messages are probably not fed into the spam filter.
Re: Ask HN: Why are OOO autoreplies ever marked as junk?
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why isn't this spam signal overridden by the fact that I just emailed this guy? What are the odds that I happened to email a spammer? I know it seems silly to care so much about OOOs, but I actually do want to know when someone will be back in the office, and whom I should contact in the meantime for urgent matters.
Your outgoing messages are probably not fed into the spam filter.
Apple's Mail program has a designation of Previous Recipient, which I believe refers to people I have previously sent email to.
While spam can certainly come from (or appear to come from) people in my address book, I would think it would be a good idea to whitelist emails that come from a recent recipient, where the subject line matches up as well.