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Comment by hogwasher | Hacker News Reader

YES. Not just the Google class action notices - though those, which Google was court-ordered to send and deliver, are the most egregious - but ALL class action or settlement related emails get automatically chucked into to my gmail spam folder no matter what.

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.

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> but ALL class action or settlement related emails get automatically chucked into to my gmail spam folder

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!

There is exactly zero chance the gmail team is unaware that epiqnotice.com is a legitimate sender of class action messages and getting falsely blocked.

But there is a non-zero chance that the false blocking can happen without any human intervention.

So what?

Not fixing it for multiple years means it's on purpose. (Unless they had some ridiculous cuts to the team size.)

There is also zero chance that there are not a fair few people who consider their messages to be UCE¹ even if they are actually due thruppence-ha'penny as their share of the class action win, and who therefore mark them as such which is a signal that automated filter management algorithms will pick up on.

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[1] They are email, from a commercial entity, and in many cases were not asked for, after all.

And those automated algorithms based on feedback need to not cross user accounts in this case. Or be disabled entirely for the domain.

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.

> 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]

> How is the filtering algorithm expected to know that?

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.

If carving out exceptions like that were implemented by their choice, there would be a shit-storm of concerns about how it could be abused, with people immediately accusing them of abusing it because a message from a Google property or political entity got through to them. I wouldn't implement that by choice in their position.

“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.

You think they have no mechanism for exceptions? And there would be a shitstorm just for having it? That's such a strange view to me that I don't think we're going to get anywhere near agreement on this.

> it's court-ordered. It's not spam.

Personally my definition of spam allows for court-ordered spam

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