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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?

#111

Post by Maken »

lumost wrote: post #86
tgraham wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Dicks Sporting Goods" email is insane - probably hourly at the moment, from what would appear obviously bogus email senders. What is the non-obvious answer as to why these get through?

These are so absolutely ridiculous. The only (dumb) reason I can think of is that there is a large ML model which got used to seeing certain character sequences as not spam and spammers are starting to exploit it. It's kinda shocking as Gmail spam filtering was virtually flawless for over a decade, and now it's falling apart.

Maybe the spammers learned about adversarial networks?

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

#112

Post by lumost »

Maken wrote: post #111
lumost wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are so absolutely ridiculous. The only (dumb) reason I can think of is that there is a large ML model which got used to seeing certain character sequences as not spam and spammers are starting to exploit it. It's kinda shocking as Gmail spam filtering was virtually flawless for over a decade, and now it's falling apart.

Maybe the spammers learned about adversarial networks?

Any non-ML method would trivially catch these spammers though. They share the common traits of

1. Sending identical emails to large numbers of users. 2. Using fake emails from fake domains. 3. Not looking at all like a regular email.

This is the stuff that 90s era spam filters could block.

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

#113

Post by kiseru »

Hah! I thought all the new spam was because we had recently moved because it was all dressed up as fake home warranty and insurance emails but a bunch of it has an old name from a breach over a decade ago. (Someone used my email with their name to open an account so a ton of my spam is addressed to some dude named Danny.) I was like, "Oh look, Danny is back." lol

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

#114

Post by jeffbee »

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.

Also just offering anecdata, the last 10 messages in my spam folder have these origins:

1) 3 "legitimate" spams, i.e. unsolicited messages that the senders believe they should have sent. 3 of these. 2 via Constant Contact and 1 via Salesforce.

2) 1 random porn spam, via random spammer domain with valid SPF and DKIM.

3) 2 phishing scams with the same body arriving from random commercial domains without DKIM. These are almost certainly spread via malware/viruses/worms.

4) 1 Google promotion originating from Google with valid DKIM, because I mark all these as spam.

5) 2 phishing messages, with the phishing warning, that originated from gmail itself via HTTP. These are pwned google accounts or google accounts logged in on machines with malware (effectively, same thing).

6) 1 idiot Republican politician, via Mailchimp.

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

#115

Post by idk1 »

Looking at all the comments here, it looks like they could just check for if the title contains Dick's Sporting Goods and then it'll be spam. Oddly... that's what mine are too. Is this going to turn into some weird bug / edge case where only Dick's Sporting Goods emails can get through the spam filter?

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

#116

Post by smt88 »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #92
smt88 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not in the US and I don't think I've ever been emailed by a political party in the UK where I live. So I don't know how it normally is. But one of my throwaway emails somehow ended up on a Trump campaign list in 2020 and it was pretty insane. I'd get multiple emails per day saying I'd been hand picked by Trump to do something, which was usually either to send him some money or fill in a survey. Once I was hand pi…

They get through spam filters by default in my experience. Gmail is pretty lenient on established companies that obey the CAN-SPAM Act.

The issue is that many Republican voters were marking them as spam, which then taught Gmail to put them in spam for (at least) that user.

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

#117

Post by butz »

Ironically, as email services are making creating new accounts even harder, by adding mobile phone verification and Google outright blocking "untrusted" clients - spam count keeps growing from gmail and outlook (hotmail) domains. And looks like gmail spam filter ain't very good either, as no matter how many spam letters you mark as spam, one definitely will get through in the future. Another problem, that one cannot ban gmail or outlook domains for incoming spam, as most business contacts are usually using those.

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

#118

Post by estebarb »

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…

In my case is a meeting invite: "Invitación: Great, you are now the winner of the mega prize! ⬅ Cada día de 18:00 a 19:00 (CST)" every day, although I marked it as phishing. I would have thought that at this point all prizes had been marked as spam.

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

#119

Post by cfeduke »

I started experiencing this myself a couple months ago, and of course searching for any sort of solution with modern search engines is a path to insanity.

Because almost all of the spam that is getting through - to me, at least - follows a very simple template - something that spam blockers should be incredibly good at handling - I was able to concoct a reasonable solution.

Google has this Apps Script thing* where you can deposit JavaScript and then schedule that JavaScript to run every minute. They expose a Gmail API and once you've given your script access to your Gmail inbox, you can process the unread messages and look for telltale signs of spam (for me, inspecting the subject for a regex match of `/confirmation#/i` has been adequate[0]) and finally move the message to spam. Since it runs every minute instead of on an event of new mail, new messages may appear unread for a short period of time.

* though there are options to deploy your project it is not necessary to do so in order to run the script on a schedule

0. https://gist.github.com/cfeduke/1dfb7f650b9abbfce549eddffc96...

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

#120

Post by ridgered4 »

elondaits wrote: post #22

The crazy thing is that on the last year I found emails from Google, and Apple, in the spam folder. Apple's were invoices... of which I get a couple a month (iTunes purchases, subscriptions). Google's I think were announcements for services, etc. tied to a Workspaces work account. I can't think of no actions I did (in terms of identifying email as spam) that could suggest I might consider emails from Google or Apple,…

> Google's I think were announcements for services, etc. tied to a Workspaces work account.

That kind of sounds like spam to me!

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