Comment by juriga | Hacker News Reader

Comment by juriga | Hacker News Reader

I've been a happy Sidebar subscriber from day one and I always browse through the weekly links. Thanks Sacha!

A quick anecdote: While reading this article I noticed that I don't remember getting my referral link from Sidebar. I searched my Gmail for "in:spam sidebar" and there it was - the only Sidebar email which Gmail has ever flagged as spam.

I know MailChimp has tools for testing the spamminess of a campaign and this message probably passed all of them since there's nothing particularly spammy about it. Maybe it was random or maybe the referral link was just enough to trigger the spam filter in (my) Gmail.

If the open rate for the MailChimp campaign wasn't particularly low spam filtering wasn't probably a significant factor in the overall conversion rate.

Glad to hear you like Sidebar!

And you're right, the open rate is much lower than usual (19% vs 63% for the one before). I didn't noticed it before because the daily edition containing the same referral link that I sent on the same day went through fine.

This happens from time to time and I'm not sure what I can do about it.

I honestly don't understand how Gmail's spam filter can be so "dumb" (at least from a human point of view). You'd think that if someone open, reads, and clicks emails from a particular address regularly, the filter would be smart enough to know that there's a very high probability it's not spam.

Gmail's spam filter definitely seems to be erring on the aggressive side nowadays. I honestly can't remember when any real spam last reached my inbox. On the other hand, I did find many other false positives while going through the spam folder, mainly from newsletters and social notifications I really have subscribed to.

I guess the least we can do is help Google tune their filters and periodically mark all false positives as "not spam".

Agreed.

Additionally one might go as far to suggest false positives are more problematic than the occasional spam mail.

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