Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmcphers | Hacker News Reader

I have exactly the opposite problem: tons of legitimate email is getting flagged as Spam by GMail.

It's now happening regularly with emails from people in my contacts with whom I regularly exchange messages.

Mind-boggling. I know spam filtering is a hard problem, but these are just obvious misses.

Same. I'd gotten out of the habit of checking my Spam folder, having trusted Gmail to get it "correct enough" for years. But I looked recently and was amazed/horrified how much legitimate email was in there, including a friend's birthday event invitation that I would otherwise have missed.

20% of what is in my "Spam" folder today is what I'd call "spam" in the classical 90s/2000s-internet sense. Obvious trash/scam stuff, usually sex-related.

Most of the rest of my "Spam" looks like what Gmail usually just labels Promotions. It's mail from legitimate organizations that I did indeed give my email address to and have a reasonable expectation of getting semi-regular email from, even if it's just trying to sell me more stuff. The Promotions auto-labeling works (worked) just fine for managing that stuff.

I figured enough users are clicking the "Spam" button on enough "legit promotional" email from real organizations that they did agree to receive email from, that Gmail just started classifying it all as spam, and now doesn't/can't distinguish between "classic" spam and "annoying emails I can't be bothered to unsubscribe from". Sort of a tragedy of the commons of crowd-sourced spam filtering. But maybe there's a better explanation.

I carefully look for “subscribe to news” checkboxes and always untick them; if you send me campaign emails without me explicitly opting in you are getting a spam flag, whether or not I gave you an address for transactional mail.

Not sure if you meant political campaign emails specifically or marketing campaign emails in general. The former are some of the absolute worst offenders in that regard, for sure.

I try to use unsubscribe links when 1) they exist and 2) the email is from a legit organization that I reasonably believe is actually going to unsubscribe me from something (if not from every place they've copied my address to by now), but I can see the argument for just flagging as spam in the case where an organization oversteps previously agreed bounds. Especially with the political campaign emails, the unsubscribe game can feel like futile whack-a-mole.

For ordinary commercial campaigns, I'd worry that flagging as spam would cause legit transactional mail (i.e. mail that belongs in the Updates auto-label) from the same organization to get flagged as well, but based on the state of my Spam folder, that's already happening anyway...

I share your concerns, but marking spam as spam is the only way to incentivise good behaviour.

If the email is from an organization I have interacted with and it offers unsubscribe, I will use that the first time. If they don’t stop, then they get the spam tag.

If an unsolicited email contains no unsubscribe, that is bad behavior and they get spam tagged immediately.

Having opt-out instead of opt-in checkboxes is pretty much illegal in Europe and will get marketers banned from good emailing services.

I receive a fair amount of legit appearing promotional email from real organizations, but organizations that I have not dealt with. In most cases the recipient appears to be a real person. In one case, I was able to verify the person is real, lives and operates a small business within a couple of hundred kilometers of where I live, and regularly frequents my city. Yet I refuse to use unsubscribe links in those cases since, aside from that one person, I have no way to differentiate between sophisticated spam and companies who don't verify email addresses on file. So the spam button it is.

I have a first.last@gmail.com and get plenty of legitimate promotional emails, one weakly-passworded credit card statement from an Indian bank each month (whose only support is an Indian phone number which I won't call), and occasional photos of "relatives" from across the world. There are about 3 or 4 people around the world with my name in various professions. I could probably do some nice identity theft if I wanted.

For the promotional stuff it's the report spam and unsubscribe button every time. I've worked in a small business that bothered to do double opt-in signups, so don't waste my time because you can't be bothered due to some vague metrics. It's spam from my POV.

For the rest it depends on my mood. If you have a noreply and it's going to take effort to reach customer service (more than an email), spam. I'm of the opinion I should be able to reply to any email and it's rude to shout at someone and then block your ears, but maybe that's old fashioned.

I also have a first.last@gmail.com address and am continually amazed at the number of people with my name who don’t seem to know their own email address and submit mine for job applications and accounts that they surely wanted to keep.

So glad I stumbled down this rabbit hole and found your comment; a fulfillment email on a Kickstarter project I backed was flagged as spam! I haven’t checked my spam folder in years, but that unfortunately changes as of today.

I went from checking my spam folder, to creating a filter rule that moves all spam into the inbox. The filter is adding a label, so I can identify them, but still have them all visible for normal congestion.

Fun fact: from time to time I still have mails in my spamfolder... seems the filter does not always get applied.

If this is company mail you might have a colleague who uses the spam button instead of delete.

I once caught my boss doing this (he was not a native English speaker, but absolutely used to communicating in English so it shocked me.)

Hmm so this is indeed a thing. I operate some email servers and often get spam notifications from, say, Hotmail, and the emails are always legitimate. It's like some people don't bother unsubscribing from lists, they just start reporting it as spam hoping it will go away.

I used to be naive and actually unsubscribe from things but it stopped working about 10 years ago so I haven't bothered since.

If the organization is legitimate, I find it usually works just fine. I usually only get such emails from organizations that I have recently started interacting with and that assume I want their newsletter. A simple unsubscribe fixes that. If I tagged it as spam, it would start to erode the ability of people who want this stuff to get it past the automated filters.

If a button is hard to find or it doesn't directly unsubcribe me, I just report the email as spam.

> It's like some people don't bother unsubscribing from lists, they just start reporting it as spam hoping it will go away.

I do that all the time. I consider every list I didn't explicitly and intentionally subscribe to as spam and treat them accordingly. I wish I wouldn't have to do that but I find subscribing someone to a list when they thought they were just buying or creating an account for a product so unnerving and disrespectful that I don't feel bad about it.

These are discussion lists that people intentionally subscribed to (which require double confirmation). I'm not that dense.

I get hundreds of different discussion list mails I have not signed up to.

I've never understood why Gmail and Hotmail/Live/Outlook don't take a user's own indications as gospel. If I whitelist an email address I want those messages, I don't care if [you think, perhaps erroneously] they are spam.

Possibly the worst is not allowing replys. I mean if a customer sends me a message, and you block the reply as spam how is that serving that customer? Sure mark it, remove viruses, obfuscate links, but let me reply to someone!

Yes it's unbelievable that gmail would send an email to spam when it's from a person with whom i have had prior correspondence with.

Clearly shows they give more weight to things like scanning, IP reputation, etc vs common sense.

GMail's spam filter no longer seems to have any intelligence. It's just a slider. Mark the obvious "Car insurance- 15324" subject message spam, and you know for a fact that immediately a bunch of legitimate mail will start getting flagged as spam. Mark that stuff as "not spam" and now you're back to getting obvious spam in your inbox.

I don't understand how to get Gmail to stop marking emails from my contacts as spam.

Funny enough, the mails it penalizes worst are GMail addresses for small businesses, like my vet or the pizza shop.

Yes, GMail is absolutely terrible on that regard. I've been missing out on project mails from an UN organisation I have been working and exchanging emails with because of their aggressive and useless filters.

For me privately, switching to a better provider solved that.

But having >25% GMail customers and always landing in Spam is horrible. Pretty much any other provider likes our mail server, but GMail always says spam.

Then you're going double opt-ins but customers still mark mails as spam because unsubscribing is too hard. Thanks for nothing.

There is actually an industry in gaming GMails spam filter to somehow get into the inbox: some offer automated replies and unmarking spam, some manually run hundreds of mailboxes and don't do anything else all day than unmarking mails as spam.

Yes. It's so bad that I find Google's own messages like Google Alerts ending up in my Spam folder. You'd think they'd whitelist their own emails.

This ^ see my comment about our experience fighting this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28636281

I’m getting the worst of both. Important emails in spam and tons of spam emails in main inbox.

I feel like it used to be near perfect. Something must’ve broken the models.

Now I am wondering if Google hasa disgruntled employee/rogue-agent in its midst's!

me too, and even more mind-boggling is important emails send right to "Trash." I have caught actually important, personal emails that were sent directly to my Trash bin. It's infuriating.

Came to write this - same here

Reply on news.ycombinator.com