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Google seems to have broken email forwarding

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Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#91

Post by npsimons »

ibz wrote: post #42
jimrandomh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason, gmail classifies nearly all of the transactional email I get from Amazon (order acknowledgements, shipping notifications, etc) as spam, and no matter how many I catch and un-mark, it won't stop. Spam classification is a hard problem, but I don't think they've put the false-positive/false-negative tradeoff in the right place, and they really need some safety valves like offering to whitelist an addres…

I always mark Amazon mail as spam. Could it be that if a lot of people mark a certain kind of email as spam, Google just treats it as spam?

Why are you doing this? If you subscribed to something, do the responsible thing and unsubscribe from it. Don't fuck up spam filtering just to be lazy.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#92

Post by guelo »

ibz wrote: post #42
jimrandomh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason, gmail classifies nearly all of the transactional email I get from Amazon (order acknowledgements, shipping notifications, etc) as spam, and no matter how many I catch and un-mark, it won't stop. Spam classification is a hard problem, but I don't think they've put the false-positive/false-negative tradeoff in the right place, and they really need some safety valves like offering to whitelist an addres…

I always mark Amazon mail as spam. Could it be that if a lot of people mark a certain kind of email as spam, Google just treats it as spam?

It's probably people like you that misuse the spam button that caused Google to give more weight to other signals for tuning their spam classifier.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#93

Post by npsimons »

throwawayaway wrote: post #47
jimrandomh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason, gmail classifies nearly all of the transactional email I get from Amazon (order acknowledgements, shipping notifications, etc) as spam, and no matter how many I catch and un-mark, it won't stop. Spam classification is a hard problem, but I don't think they've put the false-positive/false-negative tradeoff in the right place, and they really need some safety valves like offering to whitelist an addres…

well i've started marking ebay, linkedin and google+ stuff as spam. i'm sure somebody else did amazon the same favour... so... sorry? :)

Don't do this. Seriously, don't. It's one thing if you never asked to get additional emails or you can't opt out, but if you signed up for it, at least put in the same amount of effort to get out of it first. If that fails, sure, then start marking as spam. Otherwise, you're feeding false positives into the system, thereby degrading it on purpose.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#94

Post by rev_bird »

calinet6 wrote: post #62

"I run my own mail server, but..." Whelp, there's your problem.

I get why it's hard to trust mail from some random IP from Amazon Web Services, but I'm very wary of taking big chunks of the internet and just saying, "well, people aren't allowed to do that anymore, just the huge corporations." One of the best parts of the web is that it's decentralized.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#95

Post by tie_ »

copsarebastards wrote: post #46

I've long supported a proof-of-work concept augmented with whitelisted keys for email spam filtering. There are basically two cases here: 1. The sender is sending one email to one receiver. The sender computes the proof of work and sends it along with the message. This takes some time, but typically it can be done in the background. Waiting few seconds between sending and receiving an email is typically not an issue,…

> Doing things this way would mean we can drop these terrible DKIM and SPF systems that both fail to prevent spam and make it difficult to send legitimate mail.

I can understand your feelings about SPF, but why is DKIM a terrible system in your opinion?

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#96

Post by Kalium »

rev_bird wrote: post #84
Naga wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been waiting for an email from a company that I'm in the recruitment process with and your comment inspired me to check my spam folder. If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't have seen an email from a government agency looking to recruit me. So thanks!

You'd think .gov, of all TLDs, would have a lower spam score.

The domain is likely to be legit, but there are no special guarantees about the security of the mailserver.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#98

Post by lucb1e »

sergiosgc wrote: post #19
lucb1e wrote: post #7

Google has always had issues with legitimate e-mail the spambox, but then again, I have yet to see a spam filter with no false positives. Google just errors a lot more on the side of classifying email as spam compared to most email services (more false positives, but less spam in the inbox). What makes this even more annoying is that they hide the spam folder so that users don't even know that it exists anymore. I al…

Gmail is awful regarding false positives. People discount it because: a) it's a free service; b) false negatives are more frequent and thus more annoying. What is difficult in spam classification is having no false negatives and no false positives. Any decent CS graduate can create a spam classification system with no false negatives given the leeway to introduce false positives. That's what Gmail did.

> b) false negatives are more frequent and thus more annoying.

I think this is the case for the user. For the sender it's a major issue and a huge annoyance, but you don't measure user satisfaction by asking senders.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#99

Post by guelo »

eli wrote: post #18
jmount wrote: post #5

Obviously good email (deep in a conversation) being declared "spam" has been a problem with my business for some time also. I figure Google takes all email in a 2 step process (either intentional or accidental) 1: get a good fraction of the world on GMail 2: intermittently declare any non GMail mail spam ( greatly lowering the utility of non GMail). This isn't about any mass mailings or even mailing lists. This is ab…

I don't think it's malicious. Running mail servers and filtering spam is not easy.

Google has attempted to kill open protocols like xmpp and RSS in order to lock people into their services. Why is it so crazy to think they could be trying with GMail?
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