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Comment by wcunning | Hacker News Reader

GMail once ate (bypassed spam and instantly deleted it, silently) an email filled with travel itinerary for an interview, causing me to miss the flight booked for me and the company I was interviewing with to have to book a second one (~$1k). If you find this hard to believe, go check your spam folder and see how many emails you have. Do you think you're really only getting ~1 spam message a day? This is the dark side of Google's spam filtering.

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Instantly deleted it? That doesn't sound right for the spam folder.

There is a threshold for spammyness that will cause email to be dropped silently and never reach the spam folder.

I'm skeptical this is true. Is there any documentation or other evidence for this?

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/Apps/l-TmEzzF...

I read that forum rant and the linked content, and there is still no evidence that Gmail is deleting emails immediately by default. I read two possible causes:

- Content Compliance setting (managed by admin) that can prevent emails from reaching inbox

- Some other service, such as Exchange, which can somehow interfere with Gmail?

Specifically, the article mentions a "quarantine" folder that is not part of Gmail. Or am I missing something?

The quarantine folder you mention is part of the content compliance settings. Mail that matches content compliance rules goes into a quarantine that only admins can access.

There is no such silent drop. All traffic to Gmail is either delivered or rejected at SMTP time.

This is demonstrably not true. Just send mail to an email list that you are on. The email will be sent (confirm with other list members), however you will not receive it when it is relayed to the group by the listserver.

(Or was your comment tongue-in-cheek?)

That's actually an incredibly annoying fallout of gmail's deduplication that cannot be disabled. I believe gmail de-duplicates your list echo because it sees a copy in your sent folder. I wish it could be disabled :-/

Yes, this is a very annoying "feature" of gmail.

If list owners wanted this to be a feature, you could configure it on a list basis, at least in mailman. However nobody does, because it's incredibly annoying :-)

Agreed. Whenever I mail a list if I have an important message I have to ask someone if the message appeared or not. I can't verify by receiving my own copy. I use mail lists every day.

Your complaint seems to lie with the list management software, not with gmail.

It will frequently gobble up multi-lingual emails. I discovered this when I ignored a customer in Chile for a while because he had a Spanish email signature.

> bypassed spam and instantly deleted it, silently

Do you have any proof for that - I don't want to see it in detail, but I cannot remember a single incidence where my mail was just silently eaten by google? But I agree with what you said implicitly: gmail should let users chose between "move to spam", "only flag as spam" and "simply delete"; I share your pain of having to go through the spam-folder to find the one mis-classified mail once a month.

EDIT: I have had many user reports about this but when checking mail server logs I always could pin-point the problem at either the local server config or being caught in some "you are evil" classification - the latter much more time intensive to fix....)

From the end user's perspective, silently putting email in 'you are evil' classification isn't much different from just deleting.

I'd rather get spam once in awhile than turn my spam folder into a de facto secondary inbox.

I'm afraid to test it out with my personal account, but I wonder what would happen if you sent a test to a gmail account with the GTUBE spam signature? You know, the one that scores 999 points with Spamassassin.

http://spamassassin.apache.org/gtube/

Was it an automated email? Is it possible that gmail rejected the email at SMTP time and the bounce wasn't properly relayed by another system?

I keep receiving emails to other email addresses I don't own. Sometimes it contains sensitive information...

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