There were a couple of lass action lawsuits (like this one: www.GoogleWebAppActivityLawsuit.com) against Google. The emails from both lawsuits went straight to my Gmail account's 'Spam' folder. I'm glad I review my spam box regularly. Hopefully, it's just the false positive effect of the Gmail's spam filter.
How absolutely terrible is the box where you write the emails in web Gmail? I get you need more features than what a simple <textarea> provides, but how can a trillion dollar company make such an absolutely broken piece of crap as the most important part of one of their key products? You delete something and the cursor goes to the end of the email. You ctrl-z and the cursor goes before the first character of the email, not before modifying a string of a completely random length. Like a year ago, and for like a month, there was an area on the right side that didn't accept any clicks at all. Native keyboard shortcuts constantly violated.
We figured out WYSIWYG decades ago, how can it be this bad? I've resorted to writing my emails on a notepad app and pasting them when they are done. I thought it had to be an issue with some browser extensions or something, because I've never heard anyone else complaining about it, but no, it really is that bad.
And they don't ever forward spam, even if you've set up mailbox forwarding to an external address. There's no option for it. So to ever see those messages, I have to use a complicated custom rule to force it to forward all the spam to me, too.
I think it's too consistent and longlasting a problem to be accidental. I think they're spam-holing all class action notices, instead of just Google ones, so that they can claim it's just a general error in their automatic spam filter.
Every now and then I get a glut of “if you bought X in timeframe Y you might be due a pay-out” junk mail, so this might be genuine false positives rather than something more sinister.
Though the cynic in me, that has been right so many times over the years wrt corporate behaviour, is inclined to agree with your much less generous assessment!
Not fixing it for multiple years means it's on purpose. (Unless they had some ridiculous cuts to the team size.)
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[1] They are email, from a commercial entity, and in many cases were not asked for, after all.
I'm not accusing them of making the problem on purpose, I'm accusing them of not fixing it on purpose.
The notice may be from a commercial entity but it's court-ordered. It's not spam.
How is the filtering algorithm expected to know that? Especially if numerous users do mark such messages as spam (or give the more passive signal of completely ignoring it despite paying attention to other messages), or other identification rules say that the messages look like other things that have been thusly marked over time?
> those automated algorithms based on feedback need to not cross user accounts
One of the touted advantages of collective mail systems like gmail is that such filtering can apply globally instead of us all having to individually train everything to our liking. There are conflicting priorities, and unfortunately your preferred priority just isn't winning here.
[Caveat: I don't use Google's mail services for anything other than occasional testing, like sending messages to/from my own mail server after reconfiguration or other admin work]
It doesn't. The humans working there need to add an override.
> One of the touted advantages of collective mail systems [...]
You cut off the most important qualifier in what I said. "In this case." They should be isolating or flat-out ignoring feedback for specifically epiqnotice.com.
“By choice” is a load bearing member in that sentence structure, and depends on the exact wording of “court-ordered to send and deliver” - it could be interpreted, as you do, as “the messages must be made visible to the user” but I assume it has instead been interpreted as “the message must make it to the account of the user” (and the spam box as part of that account if the filters happen to put it there instead of elsewhere). We'd have to inspect the court order to see how specific or not the wording is in that area before passing judgement on the technical correctness of each interpretation.
Personally my definition of spam allows for court-ordered spam
Google used to have pretty good spam detection but now they seem to have cranked the dial over to err on the side of hiding mail the user actually wanted. It's not a good situation.