Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dear Google Mail Team

plus.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 269 posts

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#71

Post by gerbal »

c5karl wrote: post #15

I've had a problem with false positives in my spam folder for months. A large percentage of the email newsletters I subscribe to end up in my spam folder every day, and clicking Notspam doesn't help. I can Notspam a certain newsletter every day for a week, and then the next day that same newsletter will end up in my Spam folder once again. I'm starting to think that Notspam signals have no effect at an individual lev…

Yep, Gmail's spam filters work based on the collective judgment of Gmail users. The core of your and linus' problem is a lot of people use the 'mark as spam' button as unsubscribe button for mailing lists.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#72

Post by click170 »

c5karl wrote: post #15

I've had a problem with false positives in my spam folder for months. A large percentage of the email newsletters I subscribe to end up in my spam folder every day, and clicking Notspam doesn't help. I can Notspam a certain newsletter every day for a week, and then the next day that same newsletter will end up in my Spam folder once again. I'm starting to think that Notspam signals have no effect at an individual lev…

How easy is it to unsubscribe from those newsletters? Is there a one-click unsubscribe link that doesn't require you to login or enter anything before unsubscribing you?

If I've subscribed to a mailing list or newsletter and there isn't a one-click unsubscribe I'll click the Spam button to get it out of my inbox instead of going through their procedure.

One-Click Unsubscribe is paramount for mailing lists and newsletters not getting marked as Spam.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#73

Post by knodi123 »

dasil003 wrote: post #14

I could see 20% false positives on spam for Linus equating to 0.1% of false positives across the board since I suspect the people emailing Linus are 200 times more likely to be running their own mail server than the general public.

His point about marking one email in the middle of a thread is inexcusable.

I've seen that happen too. And only recently.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#75

Post by click170 »

Bill_Dimm wrote: post #56
pd1 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or when you need to log in again to unsubscribe

Which is presumably done so that if you forward the newsletter to someone else they can't (accidentally or maliciously) unsubscribe you by clicking the link.

When it's trivial to re-subscribe if you want to, I'd prefer that they do include a one-click unsubscribe. I'll deal with anyone who maliciously unsubscribes me from a mailing list that I want to be subscribed to, and this will highlight who my "good" friends are anyway.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#76

Post by kyrra »

fweespeech wrote: post #54
mordocai wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use DKIM and have Reverse DNS + SPF and gmail likes my email just fine. However, previous to setting all that up gmail would commonly mark my messages as spam. I haven't tested it in the last few days.

And the moment someone accidentally clicks the SPAM button you'll find yourself with weeks of pain on a low volume mail server. Because, as an individual, you won't qualify for their FBL service and "mysteriously" you'll have weeks of everyone saying you end up in their spam folder.

The Gmail team recently launched[0] PostMaster tools[1]. I'm not sure if everyone has access, but maybe it would help?

[0] http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-mail-you-want-not-...

[1] https://postmaster.google.com/

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#77

Post by choppaface »

dasil003 wrote: post #14

I could see 20% false positives on spam for Linus equating to 0.1% of false positives across the board since I suspect the people emailing Linus are 200 times more likely to be running their own mail server than the general public.

True, but the spam filter could certainly learn to weight private mail servers as Ham on a per-user basis. Perhaps the learning algorithm can't generalize the feature to new unseen private make servers. However, Google certainly has the engineers who can add that functionality, they just need to properly manage them to get it done.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#78

Post by wahnfrieden »

austenallred wrote: post #67
dasil003 wrote: post #14

I could see 20% false positives on spam for Linus equating to 0.1% of false positives across the board since I suspect the people emailing Linus are 200 times more likely to be running their own mail server than the general public.

I decided to do a quick check of my gmail; there were 151 emails in spam, and literally not one I would want in my inbox. It seems entirely likely that Google is weighting whether something comes from a private mail server very heavily, and Linus, being who he is, gets a lot of email from private servers. Not saying this isn't a problem, but it probably doesn't affect 99% of email users.

Just FYI, most spam does not even reach your spam folder.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#80

Post by click170 »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #41
therealarmen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't blame them when the Unsubscribe link is buried at the bottom of a 8MB marketing newsletter in 4px font.

I'd assume cybojanek is talking about majordomo-like mailing lists, the sort used by lots of open source projects, which typically require an email sent to a specific address with "unsubscribe" in the subject line and so on and so forth.

Curiously, having to email -unsubscribe@server.com to unsubscribe from a mailling list is, to me, preferable to having to login to a website in order to unsubscribe from the same mailing list.

I think it's because I'm beginning to resent the idea of every website and its dog requiring that I have a user account before I'm allowed to even browse the content.

Post reply on HN