I don’t use gmail but I have also seen a big uptick in spam getting into my actual inbox over the last few weeks. I use a filter that hasn’t been updated in years, combined with spamhaus blacklists. To me this means something like spammers have found a way to evade spamhaus blacklists since they were the most effect block to spam in my email chain.
Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?
121–130 of 150 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?
#122Migrated to Fastmail a few weeks ago. It's going swimmingly. The private addresses feature is brilliant. I can tell what service sold my address or leaked it, or otherwise gave it out somewhere against my consent. If Gmail allowed for private aliases it would thwart spam, but they won't implement it because they're anti-privacy.
Just throwing my 2c in. This sounds cool in theory, but after a couple years of doing the same thing, I've identified exactly one case of an org giving my email address to a third party, and it was a local car dealership giving it to siriusXM because a car I bought had hardware for the service.
That said, I absolutely love Fastmail and having my own domain for emails.
Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?
#123The same thing happened to me with Hotmail. It was previously great at spotting spam, but recently has stopped sending it to junk.
Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?
#124I have similar issue, but with a different flavor:
About 10 times per day I receive a blank email from an obviously throwaway spam account (e.g. vishal382190130 at gmail dot com)
For the life of me I cannot understand the purpose or goal of these emails, from the spammers' point of view. I've heard the theory that spammers will send "test" emails to check if a destination account is active... But every day? All the time? Is it possible somehow to assure the spammers that my account is active, and to start sending me actual spam, instead of empty messages?
Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?
#125The spam is quite likely coming via Google itself. Google's mail servers have been compromised for several weeks now. It's commonly being used for infected crypto spam (all those "new traderbot" emails with the attached infected PDF, for example). I'm not yet sure if these are just compromised GMail accounts, or if the mail servers themselves have been compromised. There seem to be some reports on AbuseIPDB of intrus…
Whatever happened to the Postini acquisition, did they get diluted over the years?
Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?
#126Old news for me. A few months ago, four or five messages a day during a month and then it stopped.
It was always the same template written in several languages, English, French, Spanish, with clear signs they were trying to fool the filters with fake unsubscibe links, long generated ids and business keywords.
Most of them were classified as spam, but one in ten passed through the filter.
Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?
#127To 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.
+1. I have a ridiculous number of Gmail accounts (like 20+), and regularly monitor 5 of them, and none are seeing regular spam.
I will say I’ve gotten what I consider spam from Experian where they claim to be MSAs (mandatory service announcements) on my account, but they’re clearly marketing, and I’ve just set up a rule to delete those. Done.
I also have gotten on political lists where unsubscribing doesn’t seem effective, so set up another rule to block those. Done.
Other than these 2 edge cases (that don’t seem to be blatant spam, just dark patterns), my inboxes are clean of spam.
I also have family (wife and two older sons) on Gmail, and haven’t heard them complain about spam.
One potential hint though: all of my Gmail comes through personal domains. So maybe these spam attempts are targeting gmail.com domain? I do have a gmail.com email, though, that gets forwarded to my personal domain one, and I still haven’t noticed any spam, FWIW.
Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?
#128The spam is quite likely coming via Google itself. Google's mail servers have been compromised for several weeks now. It's commonly being used for infected crypto spam (all those "new traderbot" emails with the attached infected PDF, for example). I'm not yet sure if these are just compromised GMail accounts, or if the mail servers themselves have been compromised. There seem to be some reports on AbuseIPDB of intrus…
> compromised GMail accounts
If it is coming from compromised Gmail accounts, I wonder if these same accounts are also being used to post the handful of deep-fake Elon Musk crypto YouTube Shorts that inundate the Shorts feeds.
There's hundreds, maybe thousands of these videos being posted making Shorts practically unusable. And no amount of reporting or downvoting seems to affect their algorithm.
Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?
#129It started happening fairly recently to me, and it's not a gmail account, but another popular option. I don't know what caused it.
Re: Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you! I somehow never came across that URL before. It's worth a try, though I'm not very optimistic it will help! I'd genuinely be interested to know from someone working at Google why Google can't / won't solve this, even for the narrow clearly-defined cases I see.
A) How much money does it cost Google to fix a problem? B) How much money does it cost Google to not fix a problem? If A > B then, duh!
How many Google "engineers" do you need to change a lightbulb ?