Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

Gmail also inappropriately spam-filters Stripe emails. I have received thousands of these messages and have a rule set up to file them away (skip inbox, apply a label). I don't want them in my inbox, but I like to know how many are coming in each day because it gives me a sense of payment flow for our most popular product.

You would think that gmail would be smart enough to realize that if I've received thousands of emails from an address and NEVER marked as spam/deleted, it probably isn't spam. Also, if I have a rule set up to file these messages (and keep unread), that should also throw a flag that it's not spam. But I've had to go in and create another special rule to never have this mail marked as spam.

I then had to broaden that rule because the Stripe customer service emails started getting marked as spam...

I'm sorry to hear that your Stripe emails are being spam-filtered. I work for Stripe as part of their engineering team responsible for email deliverability and would love to see some examples of email that has been incorrectly classified so we can try to prevent this from happening in the future. Would you be able to forward a few examples with full headers[0] to zack [at] stripe [dot] com?

[0] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/29436?hl=en

Will do. For weeks, every single payment notification was spam-filtered. Then a conversation with support@stripe.com was spam-filtered. I can't recall for certain, but I think the conversation was about the spam-filtering of the payment notifications.

What would you do to prevent it from happening in the future? Don't you find that google pretty opaque about why it classifies something as spam?

Spam classification by email service providers is generally quite opaque but we can at least check that we're doing everything in our power to prove that the email is legitimate. Like ensuring it passes SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and that it is being sent from an IP that is only used for transactional emails. Beyond that we would need to try to work with individual providers.

I've noticed in the past if I delete emails without reading (as is often the case when the subject and first line is enough, i.e. transactional emails) Gmail will start classifying them as spam. I'm very careful now to 'mark as read' instead.

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