Hacker News Reader

I have a hotmail throwaway account (it has since been migrated to outlook with the microsoft buyout) and its spam filter is completely backward. There is currently 373 e-mails in my inbox (100% spam, expected since it is a throwaway...) and 4 e-mails in my spam folder--100% of them the account registration/confirmation e-mails that I was wanted.

I have migrated to fastmail for all of my personal e-mail, which I have been pretty happy with. So far I haven't caught any legit email which has been categorized as spam and negligible spam that has made it through into my inbox (mailing lists notwithstanding--I sort them using automation rules). My one complaint is that there is no way to turn off their "thou shall not receive executable attachments" filter so I still need people to play the "set windows to show the file extension, change it to .txt, and then attach it" game when people want to send compiled code via e-mail.

In any case, it is certainly a much better situation than the gmail spam filter I used while in school, which had about a 10% chance of marking outside messages as spam--in fact it even started marking e-mails sent by my professor (via the university gmail) as spam...

> it has since been migrated to outlook with the microsoft buyout

Aside: Microsoft bought Hotmail in 1997! How old is that account?!

Honestly not sure, but certainly sometime in the 20th century. It was my main e-mail back then, I migrated to Yahoo! shortly after the Microsoft buyout and kept the HoTMaiL as a throwaway. When Google announced Gmail and the 1GB (with projection to infinite) storage I switched to them as soon as I got an invite, but when they changed their slogan from "Don't be evil" to "Do the right thing" with the Alphabet restructure I ditched it and moved to my own domain with Fastmail. If Fastmail starts to show signs of evil it will be as easy as updating my domain records to point toward OurMailIsActuallyGoodIPromiseThisTime.com and click through the certificate warnings on my mail clients.

That Hotmail branding survived long after the purchase; in the last few years it's the same interface as their 365 business offering now, and under outlook.com branding.

When I last had to wrangle with MS (c.5 years ago, who were dropping all our email _replies_ to customers, they had a third party that you could pay to ensure your emails got through ... apparently the problem was our domain was on an IP hosted by a company who'd previously hosted (but didn't now) a company on a different IP and that other company has sent some spam.

I sometimes wonder if certain companies can get white listed.

There's a particular perfume company that sends spam to my gmail account every month. I've been marking it spam for at least five years, but somehow it always gets through.

Remarkably, Fastmail has gotten to the point where its spam filter works better than Google's for the kind of messages I get.

The interesting thing about whitelisting is that you have to be sending a lot of emails so the company determine if you are sending spam or not. So if you have a private domain, your own mail server, and are sending only a small number of emails then your not going to get whitelisted. Sometimes you can get on a feedback loop but all that will tell you is if someone clicked on "this is spam".

In testing different mail servers I find that Gmail will treat them differently based upon there hello line. I can't remember which one was accepted most but there is a difference. Also you need to look into if others on your netblock are sending spam. If you are on the same netblock as a spammer then gmail will treat you as if you are the spammer.

This site is very useful if you have your own mail server https://www.senderscore.org/

Heh, I get a recapcha from that site. The irony.

The biggest problem to me with Gmails spam filter is that it is so totally hit and miss, and there seems to be no reliable way of ensuring that messages stop going to spam, even from other Gmail accounts, from people on my contact list, that I've persistently marked not spam.

At this point the only reason I'm still using Gmail is sheer inertia, and it's a question of when I get time to start untangling myself from it.

Have you tried filter rules?

Yes. I've also used Google Apps and had it file e-mails from our own users as spam despite settings that's supposed to bypass it.

Meanwhile some Gmail addresses I have rarely have this problem, so it's not even consistent across accounts or domains.

The most annoying bit (and probably the first untangling from Gmail I'll be doing) is that I have my own domain hosted on Google Apps, but since my main Gmail mailbox is a different one, it's set to forward everything. It's meant to bypass all filtering and just forward. Or so the settings and support claims. It doesn't. I have to regularly log in for the sole purpose of marking things not spam.

Not sure about OP but to me rules in GMail don't work.

Gmail filters don't seem to work anymore. I had filters and labels and it was great but I noticed they seems to be failing.

If you go down the rabbit hole of Google Gmail support you'll find filters don't apply to email ("conversations") already in your inbox. But they also don't seem to apply to new email.

Asking on various groups people seem to be giving instructions for options in GMail that no longer exist.

I think they change the way it works, and then existing filters may break at one point. I've had this happen to several filters.

TBH, it's just easier to re-do the filters. There's also an option to make it apply to old conversations on a one-time basis as well.

I've tried that without success. Delete all rules/filters, labels and re-create it all again. Nothing will work on old or new messages. And "apply to zero conversations" is the only thing I see that seems like it would be it but the zero part means no chance of working.

Gmail even replied to me on Twitter saying the filters no longer work.

Screenshot of Gmail reply on twitter https://i.imgur.com/URhBeXn.png

I like using filters I don't see why such an important email tool is so awkward to use on Gmail.

It doesn't seem to work. In fact, IIRC, they simply add a huge button dialogue to any such emails that pass due to a filter to mark it as spam, without any buttons to dismiss their improper suggestion — e.g., you can't even confirm that the mail isn't spam anymore if you use such filters.

If the mailing list is using a bulk email service, then they should use DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Sender Policy Framework (SPF) for identifying ownership & not getting marked as spam i.e. If they aren't really a spam.

Sorry, but your advice have been detached from reality for a long time.

SPF is not a "should" anymore, it is a must. Many major e-mail providers will outright reject your e-mail at SMTP level, unless you have correct SPF record. Rest will move SPF-less e-mail to spam on automatic basis. In this sense SPF does help you to get delivered, and avoid getting into spam bin, but your chances can only go from "100% spam" to "90% likely spam", not "0% likehood of being spam".

DKIM is not a major consideration for Gmail (or anyone, as far as I know) and have never been one. You will not magically avoid spam bin by using DKIM. Instead DKIM provides a great opportunity to botch your reputation with mail servers: as soon as you forward a e-mail (between providers or within the same provider) it will lose it's DKIM validity, and thus may get classified as spam (!!) on the basis of invalid DKIM signature. Boom! you are a spammer now.

Valid SSL cert and valid SPF are the only things, that have noticeable impact on Gmail's treatment of your email. DKIM and DMARK and largely useless and can only get you in extra trouble.

As for bulk email, it is going to be classified as spam until your domain and IP gain sufficient reputation. The only way to gain that reputation is to send slowly increasing amount of email for long time without being marked as spam. Being a rich business, Google's client, hanging on Google's forums, using Gmail as your mail server and having at least dozen contacts among Google's employees also helps.

This same thing started a few weeks ago for me as well. I have a cron job that parses my log file and sends me usage statistics every morning. I had been receiving this email for 100+ days when suddenly it stopped. I investigated thinking it was a problem in my script only to find that all worked well and all emails were in my spam.

I use SES from AWS and now my new user sign ups emails for email verification also end up in spam. It’s very frustrating because they changed some rule and now my low volume email sending is considered spam

You know you can set a rule to send nothing to spam? Or to whitelist certain senders/domains/subjects?