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Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?

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Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?

#61

Post by dwringer »

rconti wrote: post #57
enlyth wrote: post #10

To offer a singular data point, contrary to other posters here, I am not seeing this at all, and I pretty actively use my two Gmail addresses which have been active since 2005. My spam inbox regularly gets correctly categorized spam, and important emails still correctly land in my inbox.

It is incredibly strange to hear from you (and others in this thread) who don't have a spam problem with GMail. From everyone I've talked to, it seemed endemic. From my experiences with my own account (circa 2004), GMail has moved backwards in recent years. I'd say it became a serious problem a few years ago. Marking things as spam is useless because then you immediately start getting legitimate mail marked as spam.…

I get an unfiltered spam message in my inbox maybe once every month on average. I always assumed these are new campaigns with the newest "zero-day" exploits of the spam filter. Much more common is getting newsletters for which I have actually signed up, and marked as "Not Spam" in the past, delivered straight to my Spam folder.

The number of spam messages I get in general, judging from what shows up in the Spam folder, varies wildly from week to week. Sometimes I'll get five over a two-week period, and then get a week where I receive about 15 per day.

Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?

#62

Post by smt88 »

jonas-w wrote: post #6

They announced that their spam filter got to good and that they will allow political spam to go around their spam filter. https://www.androidpolice.com/gmail-political-spam-experimen...

It's not because the filter was "too good," it's because political campaigns use hyper-aggressive email tactics that they learned from digital marketers.

Trump's campaign(s) apparently took this to a new level (a friend of mine says he'd get up to 10 Republican emails every day, many of which had alarming subject lines) and now Republicans are claiming to be treated unfairly.

Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?

#63

Post by ChrisRR »

enlyth wrote: post #10

To offer a singular data point, contrary to other posters here, I am not seeing this at all, and I pretty actively use my two Gmail addresses which have been active since 2005. My spam inbox regularly gets correctly categorized spam, and important emails still correctly land in my inbox.

Same here. I've had one or two that slip through the cracks once every few months, but otherwise all spam gets sent to the spam box

Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?

#64

Post by declon »

sodality2 wrote: post #48
tallanvor wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately every major provider has this happen. Google and Microsoft especially since they have their productivity platforms that send mail through the same infrastructure as their free email services. They also have to deal with more problems through compromised education accounts - students aren't that great at protecting their school credentials, and some businesses aren't much better.

I don't think that it's common for a Google mail server to be brute forcing SMTP logins for other servers, and also sending high amounts of spam. It looks like the server has been compromised, or else why would Google be making SMTP login requests?

You can give Gmail your SMTP login details and tell it to send your mail via another server.

Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?

#65

Post by JoeOfTexas »

smt88 wrote: post #59
pcorsaro wrote: post #21

For me, it just goes in cycles. For a couple of weeks, I'll get these spam emails from "Dick's Sporting Goods" telling me I won a chance at a Yeti cooler or something like that. These emails will make it through gmail's filter for a while, then they catch them, then they figure out how to get through again. That particular set of emails seems to be the only spam that ever makes it through the filter, but the cycle ha…

I also get the Dick's Sporting Goods emails and am baffled and amazed that such a stupid, obvious scam is beating the world's best spam filters that have billions of data points in their training set.

It's funny cause the from email is like: aklsdjflkasdjf@dkaljklsdjfls.com

Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?

#66

Post by eunice »

I found gmail's spam filtering amazing from 2004 until this year, where it's massively gone downhill and I've been getting tons of obvious garbage hitting the inbox and things I want from known senders landing in junk. Moved my business email to fastmail, perhaps personal will soon follow.

Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?

#67

Post by civilized »

bluedino wrote: post #43

I get about 10 per day. They all seem to come from hacked O365/Gmail accounts. All 4 of my Gmail accounts are affected. It's all the same crap that's obviously spam. "Dear Friend, I hope this email finds you well. I need your assistance in a matter..." "You've been chosen!" "Home Depot/TruGreen/Dicks Sporting Goods/ADT-Security" "Invoice enclosed" "You've received a direct deposit..." "Hot sex " I would guess that Gm…

Weirdly awed and relieved to know that I'm just a small part of the Dick's Sporting Goods spam epidemic.

Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?

#68

Post by goshx »

SteveNuts wrote: post #47
davidbarker wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! I'm getting around 10 Dick's Sporting Goods emails per day. It's a relief to know it's not just me.

I'm expecting my Yeti cooler any day now

Im waiting for the M20 cooler and the Samsung Neo QLED 8K Smart TV

Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?

#69

Post by d3vmax »

In the last month what services/website did you sign up for online/offline? They maybe the source of the leak/spam. Alternatively, your ID got into the spammers list via a service you must have signed up for prior, which must have got hacked recently. Another scenario is your acquaintance/friend ID must be compromised and they spam everyone on their contact list.

The spammers must be keeping it under 500 emails per day / gmail outgoing account to not go over google's thresholds.

Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?

#70

Post by aceazzameen »

I'm having the opposite problem. I have a custom domain email address through a webhost, which gets forwarded to Gmail. I've been using Gmail as my client since day 1 (around whenever Gmail first came out). Some time in early summer I stopped getting emails from my wife, who uses a plain Gmail address. I was missing messages in threads if she was the sender. This has never happened before. So I checked the logs on the webhost, and it turns out Gmail was rejecting mail sent from her with an error that her address is spam. And I don't mean it went into the spam folder. It straight up rejected the messages and wouldn't go to the Gmail servers at all. I found this crazy, because it was rejecting a Gmail address that has been used for years. And in message threads that included others with Gmail addresses. And if she emailed me to my actual Gmail address, it was fine and not spam. But her address (and only hers) gets marked as spam if sent to my domain.

So my solution was to start using Thunderbird. Her messages were never being rejected by my domain and all the threads are there intact.

Edit: This was the SMTP error that Google was telling my domain: "Our system has detected that this message is likely unsolicited mail. To reduce the amount of spam sent to Gmail, this message has been blocked."

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