Ask HN: Spammers got smarter or Gmail is no longer good? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Spammers got smarter or Gmail is no longer good?

70 pointskasra8536 comments

How on earth this email passed the spam filter? https://ibb.co/4PrjH9V

Recently I am getting more and more of these emails in my inbox.

I almost never get spam outside of the spam folder.

What I get instead is that half of the messages in the spam folder are not spam.

This is actually even worse than just not having spam filtering. I still have to pick the spam out manually and ignore/delete it, but now I have to check two folders every day instead of one.

Same thing with Outlook web version. There is no way to disable the spam filter, and various workarounds suggested by users on forums tend to stop working randomly (e.g. creating a rule to move each message where you are the recipient to "Inbox" worked until recently but no more)

Which is some of the reason why I no longer use email much apart from Work settings.

Spam control isn't precisely an email problem, but a "system where arbitrary people not in my contact list can reach me" problem, same as telemarketers and SMS. Federated, open, lots of ways to describe it.

I agree that positively approving contacts is a great way to avoid the threat of spam, but that concept does have occasional downsides.

I've never had spam issues with gmail until about 3-4 weeks ago..now I get spam every single day and I always mark as spam + block, but haven't seen any improvement.

My fastmail account has been a great alternative, but for many reasons I can't totally drop the gmail account

Yes I reckon they overcooked the algorithm since about 3-4 weeks ago I noticed a very large jump in legit email being false-flagged as spam by gmail.

Even many emails from GitHub issues tracker were shoved into Spam erroneously.

The "not spam" button is not working very well so far this year and I'm clicking the same kind of email dozens of times as Not Spam but this is flaky and not a reliable method.

What DOES work as a manual patch to fix this, is create a Filter for a domain or email address you trust and tick the filter option to Never Mark as Spam.

Time to leave Gmail anyway...

I've just finished reading about the process before I begin moving a dozen grandfathered personal and my SMB client domains from gmail over to Fastmail.

Fastmail is going to be much better value than gmail (once these previously grandfathered free domains are no longer free with gmail any more).

Fastmail Seive plus Dropbox integration looks really powerful and I'm keen to try it.

Fastmail Reseller Account is the practical way forward for a better value feature-set.

Moving DNS hosting to Fastmail also...

I set up forwarding from my main Gmail address to an alias at Fastmail. This gives me a backup in case I get locked out of one account or the other.

I'm both getting really obvious spam in my mailbox and legit email in my spam box. It's been bad for a couple years. Outlook.com is still much worse for me though.

I'm wondering if spammers are just getting too good to be reasonably stopped at this point. We see high false-positive and false-negative rates. It's maddening. Once again advertisers and scammers (is there a difference?) show themselves to be the reason we can't have nice things.

My email account's spam folder receives spam at a pace of one every 2 hours (my address got pwned) and one or two of them per day seem to make it to the inbox. I can't ditch that account right now as all email from government services and social circles are still received there as well, as that address has been used for something like 12 years now.

A change in the Google's antispam algorithms (is it still blacklisting?) might be the cause, and I additionally suspect the spam mails' extensive use of latin-looking unicode characters to evade the filters.

It seems categorically less effective now than before, but you don’t know what you don’t see.

Early on, a client of ours had a domain receiving literally hundreds of thousands to millions of spam a day. Commercial filters were ineffective, the domain was unusable for their common addresses, only thing that worked was /dev/null. On a hunch, we tried moving it to paid Google Apps for Your Domain, which proved staggeringly effective: 100% of spam were filtered, zero false positives.

One thing we learned: turns out Google does have human support engineers / SREs who really badly want to speak to you live if you’re generating meaningfully visible load w/o violating any terms of service. :-)

Today, on a diff @gmail.com account (in public records dating back to launch) that got no spam in the Inbox then despite hundreds in the spam folder a day, gets hundreds a day in the inbox today, same amount in the spam folder. No idea how many are filtered before even hitting spam folder though. Could be that hundreds in the inbox and thousands in the spam folder are just the long tail noise of billions filtered before delivery? Afraid to move it to find out!

I have a dark-pattern theory: Gmail tracks retention metrics, one of whose proxies are app opens. If you don’t get a lot of email, or haven’t opened the gmail app in a while, then they purposely let some spam through to trick you into an app open. Also, people who are susceptible to click on spam are likely excellent targets for Google’s behemoth ad platform, so it probably leads to higher conversion (by collecting data points on you).

This sort of evidence-free conspiracy-theory cynicism is common these days. I don't think it's helpful.

How to obtain evidence from a closed system? Sadly, large multinational corporate behavior in the field of walled gardens (or vehicular safety, or financial practice...) has often tended toward perverse and scheming motivations, so a reasonable degree of creative cynicism is not uncalled for. We humans are, after all, creative and greedy little bastards.

Yes noticed as well. Not my inbox but my wife’s - the severity of which she is considering getting a new email address (& ditching gmail acct that is 10+ years old)

Same problem here. And marking genuine emails as 'not spam' does not guarantee the mail will come through next time.

What makes this weird to me is that most of my newsletter emails will come through fine, but then one or two are filtered as spam. Like, at least make up your mind about whether the sender is legitimate instead of using a random number generator?

I've had my gmail address for more than 15 years and the spam filter worked perfectly until the last couple of years when comically obvious spam messages started getting directly into the inbox. At first I thought that my email address got listed in some spammers' databases but it doesn't make any sense, since it has been up for so many years and the spam messages could be filtered with a really, _really_ simple spam filter algorithm.

Obviously something's going on with gmail and I am still not sure what is, but it's definitely not a bug (it has been like this for too long now) and the spammers definitely didn't get smarter (caricature like spam messages).

Does anyone know if Google has recently started offering some paid spam protection or something?

I am getting multiple spam mails per day now in my main gmail inbox. I think maybe google is offering paid access to companies who send marketing emails? I signed up for a certain kind of service, but didnt use it, and now get many emails per week from competing companies which are spam, but get through.

I got two of the exact same spam messages in a gmail inbox this morning that was as of yet "unspoiled" and not in some spam email database. Those were probably the first in more than a year.

I’m going to be contrarian and honestly say I have no issue with Gmail’s spam filter. Works really well for me.

Same here. Just checked my spam folder. No idea what's going on for these people.

That one got past the filter mostly because it was sent from an actual Gmail address. You're probably one of the unlucky few who got spam in their inbox before the account was flagged for spam.

No idea about gmail. I'm on fastmail, I get some spam now and then, always have. Spam is never good but it doesn't seem worse recently than before. I've been on fastmail for 5+ years.

This is spooky. I just read this post, cmd+tabbed to my mail app, refreshed, and got a version of this exact email.

I never have problems with gmail+spam otherwise.

Not that spooky. Was it a Gmail account? If so, you know the answer as to why: something about this particular email meant that it wasn't caught by the spam filter.

I went through a wave of similar emails all day and now it seems to have stopped without me doing anything. Kind of weird

I got this one too! Also not in spam

Is the spam coming in via an external account that you're fetching via POP?

I've switched to paid for protonmail for all my important stuff.

Spam is unfortunately an intractable problem to solve.

This has been my experience as well over the last 2 years.

these are all coming from gmail accounts aren't they

I have a Gmail account. I haven't been able to access it for at least four years. Google locked me out because I couldn't satisfy its demand for "two-factor authentication", which apparently to Google means "send a text message to a cellular phone."

It's not any great loss, I just kept it as an alternate address for when I needed to send email to someone (or vice versa) and over-enthusiastic mail admins decided to "fight spam" by blocking entire top-level domains or countries.

Which country are/were you in that was getting blocked?

can confirm, lately also noticed blatant spam getting through, maybe last 1-2 years.

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