Hacker News Reader

Comment by randerson | Hacker News Reader

It's a great reminder of how good this feature is that we take for granted. I think this outage has actually improved my appreciation for Gmail (a service I normally only complain about).

View on HN

Seriously. I didn't even realize this was a wide issue, but I couldn't find a school enrolment email I was looking for this morning, and found it in the spam folder. The fact that I basically never have to do this is actually amazing.

I wonder about difference in experience that different people have with gmail’s spam filter. In my case, the majority of emails that go to my gmail spam folder are legitimate. I don’t actually receive much spam, a single-digit number of emails per month (in the past 30 days, 2 emails), so any time I see anything in my spam folder I have to check so that I can rescue the email if legitimate.

This is my experience also. Closely guarded email, haven't received _any_ spam to it to date, but a large volume of false positives. This, among other reasons, actually led to my setting up my own email server again. Gmail is a great product if you don't know what you're doing or have avaliable to you. It's like a McDonalds burger. Not inpressive, not good, bot bad either, and certainly won't offend anyone while being accessible --- but calling it good is a bit out of touch with what good looks like.

I kinda expect there are a lot of false positives that people just never notice because they've got also thousands of unread (non-spam) emails in their inbox and never check their spam to see if there's anything legitimate there.

They probably have a trillion emails with human labels, either from users directly applying them, or inferrable from actions like deleting.

With that much data, even a simple Bayesian classifier should work pretty much perfectly.

I strongly disagree.

They even mark their own Arts & Culture email as spam: https://x.com/MBanerjeePalmer/status/1962538753328664693

Yeah i have fantasies of having my own email server and stuff but the spam detection is probably the 3rd thing that would have me crawling back

I'm running my own mail server for longer than I'd like to admit, but not for my critical/key email addresses. Looking at the spam filtering I get in Gmail and knowing my endless fights with spamassassin and DSBLs I know I could never achieve that.

The only upside of having an actual mail server is the ability to say "this is incorrect, no one ever tried to send an email to this address/from this IP" or custom 55x messages.

I have run my own mail server for years and I rarely see spam. I'm running a classic Bayesian filter as outlined in the legendary PG post "A Plan For Spam" and it works very well. I don't really get all the fuss about this issue. When I do see a piece of unclassified spam I simply classify it and continue. For me this is a far better tradeoff than having all my most private mail on some bigcorp server where any nerd can rifle through it.

> For me this is a far better tradeoff than having all my most private mail on some bigcorp server where any nerd can rifle through it.

You've functionally given yourself very little extra privacy because the vast majority of emails you send or receive will still cross through BigCorp servers (whether Google, Microsoft, Intuit, or other).

You can do the work to run your own mail server, but so few other people do that one end of the conversation is still almost always feeding a corporation's data lake.

And yet, if you're communicating with someone else who does the same (or uses a niche hosted provider), that entire conversation is outside their "data lake".

Yes, but such people are so rare that they're functionally non-existent. I certainly don't know even one.

And this is why I take more and more of what I do offline

Apart from self-hosting, you can choose a non-big-corp email service, which happens more often. Quite a few of my emails never get to big corps.

And they will become ever rarer when more of those who could do that follow your argumentation.

I agree with you but I still run my own mail server. If people like me stopped doing that, we would cede the entire email landscape to BigCorp. A sad fate to happen to one of the true decentralized protocols. It's like if we all just went back to AOL

It's more expensive and difficult to hack or get a warrant to access multiple bigcorp servers with a variety of privacy stances and jurisdictions, than it is to get access to a single one. Security is about making attacks expensive.

No single BigCorp employee can go through all my mail.

If you're not convinced, no problem, please continue to enjoy your BigCorp email service.

As someone who's run my own email for 25 years or so (I'm really getting old...) my biggest problem is not that I receive spam (spamassassin mostly takes care of it) but that my sent emails get marked as spam by big email providers. Yahoo is the worst offender and seems to do so at some base despite my best efforts (spf, dkim, arc, and jumping through their registration hoops)

FWIW, the feature works just as well for me with my FM inbox (I still have my old gmail address and check both spam and the inbox once in a while).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com