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Dear Google Mail Team

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Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#211

Post by blfr »

scintill76 wrote: post #120
nmjenkins wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be a high volume sender with a good reputation (low spam reports) to get access to these tools.

And they don't tell you whether you meet those criteria, until after you go to the trouble of logging in and serving a DNS TXT record for ownership verification, as I just found. Granted, I didn't expect to qualify, but it would have been nice if they'd told me up front.

Yes, but at least they're using the same verification mechanism as elsewhere so if you have already added the domain to Google Webmaster for example under the same Google Account, it will be automatically verified.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#212

Post by frik »

elevensies wrote: post #5

It might not be related, but I've been seeing some spam in my gmail inbox in the past month. It seems that something has upset the balance. For example, this went to my inbox: From: [...] Baby Subject: HELLO HANDSOME Body: HOW ARE YOU DOING

Have you checked the mail raw text. Maybe it's just disguised as gmail but sent from another third party server. Or spammers found a way to spam within gmail or hacked gmail. Both had happened at least once.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#213

Post by mkhpalm »

The unfortunate thing about gmail is its gotten worse than AOL was to deal with on the spam front. I feel like there are historical lessons worth learning regarding where all those @aol.com users went.

1. Everything became "spam"

2. They got to a point where they believed they were the standard

3. Nobody could do anything about it

I can think of many places where this same situation has played out. Its yet to work long term without disastrous results after a reign of technical darkness. That doesn't seem to stop people from thinking it won't happen to them.

Its fine to aggressively fight spam. If you choose to error on the side of false positives then its in your own interest to provide reasonable recourse. If not, you've left a very large gap that somebody else will come in and fill. Just as google did.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#214

Post by jrapdx3 »

FWIW after reading this article, and comments here, I decided to check on the gmail account of a small not-for-profit organization I belong to (I'm the unofficial IT guy). I was shocked, there were 4127 spam messages, and just 98 unread items in the inbox. Slogging through the spam I did find some non-spam mail, but altogether that was Of course gmail deletes spam more than 30 days old, so how does it happen than an obscure educational non-profit gets over 4000 spam messages a month? Gmail must be a huge spam magnet, but still a mystery how those messages find their way into this spam bucket. (Unless in the past somebody had abused the account and the email address is on a thousand spammers lists...)

In any case hard to be certain what criteria the spam filter uses to declare a piece to be "spam". Not all the misclassified emails were sent from "private" servers, it would be useful if it was more clearly specified.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#215

Post by snogglethorpe »

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.

Yeah, whatever the problem here is, it's almost certainly very user-specific, depending on the mix of email they get, and Linus is probably somewhat atypical.

I saw his original post on G+, and of course immediately went and checked my gmail spam folder.... and... no false positives at all, 100% correctly identified spam.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#216

Post by junto »

Jemaclus wrote: post #171

I've been actively interviewing for the past few weeks, and I've noticed that a very large number of emails from companies and recruiters (mostly recruiters) have been marked as Spam or at least shunted off to a non-Inbox folder. I don't have any specific custom filters in place, so this is 100% Gmail's doing. I find that interesting and frustrating -- and none of these companies/recruiters have ever seen this before…

This is mainly due to the fact that so many recruiters have poor practices. I have a rule that if I'm contacted by a recruiter (unsolicited) I politely ask them to remove my details from their database. I label their email as unsubscribed and archive the email in Gmail.

When I get a second email from a recruiter that previously has been marked as unsubscribed then I click that 'mark as spam' button.

I've been doing this for eight years, since I'm quite happy with my work situation and have actively tried to remove myself from their databases over that time. However my CV still seems to be floating around, even though I've also deleted it from every online job portal I was signed up to.

At some point most recruiters need to feel that pain, because they just don't listen.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#217

Post by bliker »

jrapdx3 wrote: post #214

FWIW after reading this article, and comments here, I decided to check on the gmail account of a small not-for-profit organization I belong to (I'm the unofficial IT guy). I was shocked, there were 4127 spam messages, and just 98 unread items in the inbox. Slogging through the spam I did find some non-spam mail, but altogether that was Of course gmail deletes spam more than 30 days old, so how does it happen than an…

I’ve noticed the same thing. Do you by any chance have a catch-all address? That was the major source of spam in the inbox for me.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#218

Post by jarcane »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #104
EStudley wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree completely. Wasn't there a thread here a just few days ago discussing Gmail consistently marking personal mail servers as spam? EDIT: Found it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9855030

Yes, Google seems to have flipped some switch or pushed some change that takes well established domains and senders from that domain and for reasons that are not well understood written them off as spam. In theory they are getting a huge 'not spam' signal back at HQ but I agree with Linus that they screwed up big time. Stuff they should know wasn't spam and have in the past not classified as spam, now suddenly is. Al…

This started hitting several of my mailing lists a while back. Not just personal servers, but several major web mail providers, most notably Yahoo and AOL. Some theories floated around that it had to do with a change to header/certificates, but I don't recall if I saw any actual confirmation of that.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#219

Post by davidgerard »

EStudley wrote: post #23
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 agree completely. Wasn't there a thread here a just few days ago discussing Gmail consistently marking personal mail servers as spam? EDIT: Found it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9855030

This hit us at work really badly: we use GApps, and everything from our internal list server (which we can't replace with GMail aliases because $REASONS) was being sent to spam ... and there was literally no way to whitelist this across the company automatically.

You know how Google treats its free customers with utter contempt? I can assure you, they treat paying customers with the same contempt.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#220

Post by davidgerard »

noir_lord wrote: post #32
secabeen wrote: post #2

I run my own mail server with full SPF, DKIM and SRS, routing the mail through a relay at a reputable VPS provider on high-reputation IPs. Over the last few months, there seems to be this pattern where if I email someone @gmail who I've never mailed before, they don't seem to ever get it. I wonder if this is the issue.

This is one of the reasons I use Google Apps for Business for email (that and I find running mail servers tedious) as deliverability is consistently simpler.

It's just as fucked-up for our use of GApps, and customer service is just as absent for paying customers as free ones.

Microsoft could own business email again just by answering the phone.

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