Ask HN: Gmail spam filtering suddenly marking everything as spam?
Posted by goopthink 7 hours ago
Almost all transactional emails are being marked as suspicious even when their SPF/DKIM records are fine and they’ve been whitelisted before. Did Google break something in gmail/spam filtering?
Comments
Comment by dang 5 hours ago
(from other threads that we merged hither)
Comment by Zigurd 4 hours ago
Comment by northtwilight 25 minutes ago
Good job Google!
Comment by bryant 3 hours ago
Comment by randerson 5 hours ago
Comment by sbrother 5 hours ago
Comment by samrus 1 hour ago
Comment by subscribed 1 hour ago
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.
Comment by B1FIDO 7 hours ago
The reason given is that "Gmail hasn't scanned this message", so I suppose the scanners are unavailable/disabled for the time being.
They should also be tagged as "Important" but they are not. I believe this is a heuristic-based designation, and it has not been working too great lately. My most important mail is coming through as "unimportant".
Comment by B1FIDO 5 hours ago
You could click "Seems Safe" on these messages, but they are not scanned by Google, and they are simply adding a disclaimer that they currently can't vouch for the safety of a message that they couldn't scan. It seems to me that this is a prudent and helpful course of action.
Comment by mychele 6 hours ago
Comment by zukzuk 6 hours ago
Ive since gone on an unsubscribe campaign, and things seem bearable now.
Comment by SequoiaHope 6 hours ago
Comment by dylan604 3 hours ago
wow, you really do that? Doesn't that just prove that the email address is read by a human and then promoted for even further SPAM to be delivered?
Comment by doubled112 1 hour ago
I don’t care about whatever new shows Netflix has. Unsubscribe.
I don’t care about my DNS registrar having a sale. Unsubscribe.
Comment by decimalenough 2 hours ago
Comment by jeffbee 4 hours ago
This never happened. It was a lie spread on Twitter. And now you are spreading it.
Comment by deckar01 2 hours ago
Comment by pushedx 6 hours ago
Comment by Gazoche 5 hours ago
They’re the very obvious, very obnoxious kind of spam, and Gmail still correctly sends them to the junk bin, so I wonder if they were shadowbanned before and Google simply decided to make the process more explicit (which I don’t hate on principle).
Either that or my address was scrapped from somewhere by a spam bot and the timing is coincidental.
Comment by jeffbee 4 hours ago
Comment by robertcope 6 hours ago
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Comment by notenlish 1 hour ago
Comment by callumprentice 2 hours ago
Comment by tomcam 17 minutes ago
It's good to be you! My wife and I both have 3-letter first names so we never had that option, despite getting in on the Gmail beta 20+ years ago.
Comment by zahlman 3 hours ago
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Comment by telliott1984 7 hours ago
Comment by YoukaiCountry 5 hours ago
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Comment by calin2k 6 hours ago
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Comment by Aboutplants 6 hours ago
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Comment by nubinetwork 5 hours ago
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Comment by exabrial 5 hours ago
Comment by whateveracct 7 hours ago
Comment by donutshop 7 hours ago
Comment by anonym29 1 hour ago
Comment by sss111 7 hours ago
Comment by skygazer 4 hours ago
I now never get good email in the spam folder, and never get undetected spam in the inbox, and very occasionally get a spam erroneously rescued, but still visually flagged as iffy-but-maybe-ham.
If Gmail has been lax at filtering spam lately, I haven’t noticed, but perhaps the Bayesian filter has been picking up the slack.
Comment by lanstin 2 hours ago
Comment by B1FIDO 7 hours ago
This is very easy and straightforward. I operate 6 Gmail accounts, and three are "alts" where I've basically never given the address out to anyone at all, and they receive zero spam, zero UCE, zero marketing emails.
Of course, on my "main" I've disclosed the address to many entities and I use it for sign-in and shipping and many things. And yes, I do receive spam and scam emails there, but wcyd?
Comment by EvanAnderson 5 hours ago
(I don't much care because the account was just used for interacting with somebody else's Google-hosted junk but, if I had been using it for something serious, I have probably been frustrated.)
Comment by B1FIDO 5 hours ago
In fact, this is plainly evident by the way they give you tools to operate them in a systematic way. You can add multiple accounts to a single Android "user". You can add them to a single Google Chromebook account under one signed-in account. You can add multiple accounts separately to the same Chromebook.
You can add multiple accounts with the same names, the same birthdates, and the same Driver License. I've validated at least two YouTube channels by showing exactly the same ID.
Google did not terminate your account for the reason you state. You are not telling us all the background information.
Google may indeed terminate multiple accounts for the same person because of TOS violations. They will definitely link and associate your accounts, so making an "alt account" for misbehavior is not safe. If my "alt account" is compromised or violates TOS, then I can expect they will discipline all 6 equally, because they're all linked.
But operating multiple accounts is very explicitly supported by Google, and by Microsoft as well, I will say. I don't know about Apple. Facebook definitely prohibited this in the past, although you can maintain multiple "profiles" and "pages" that have unique settings and personalities.
Comment by FractalParadigm 6 hours ago
Comment by B1FIDO 6 hours ago
I use them for different purposes. They are "role accounts" for projects I am doing, such as geneaology and astronomy.
In order to use YouTube sanely, and store different stuff in Drive, I separate them into unique accounts. I use those accounts for specific things, and my YouTube subscriptions, playlists, etc. are tailored for each role, for example.
This is not about email at all. Obviously, I can access all those email accounts through the one app on my smartphone or the one PWA on my Chromebook. They are easily manageable but separate.
I also run 3 Outlook/Microsoft accounts, and for the same reason. (One of them is my academic account from community college, and the other two are personal.)
I don't need to give out email addresses for the "role accounts" except where I "Sign In With Google" to various services. So I don't really send/receive email from them at all, except where I'm sharing links or documents with myself (the best way to do this cross-account is still by using email, oftentimes.)
Comment by PaulDavisThe1st 5 hours ago
Rarely does more than one per day show up in my main inbox.
Why should I care who has my email address?
Comment by B1FIDO 4 hours ago
Of course, with a well-known email address, you could run a higher risk of credential stuffing, and an account takeover by someone who hijacks your email account, and then pivots from there to taking other accounts.
But this seems to be a risk we all take: email addresses are meant to be shared, to be public, and to be well-known to anyone to correspond with us.
I will say that disclosing my email address to certain parties has had noticeable effects. For example, I used "MYADDRESS+Echovita@gmail.com" once, and only once. My godfather had passed away, and I ordered some flowers for his funeral. And I put that order through with that email address.
Well, Echovita themselves had a data breach shortly afterwards, and I was inundated with scam emails. Just all sorts of attackers and they were basically all using the same M.O. But they were readily identifiable because I had used that "+Echovita" to identify it uniquely. And they really haven't stopped coming in. It's been 5 years since that breach.
So yes, especially with untrusted parties, it may help to tag your email address. I don't worry about receiving spam anywhere. But like I said, since I've never ever disclosed the addresses of 2-3 of my "alt accounts" they simply never receive any mail at all, spam or no spam.
Comment by DANmode 3 hours ago
so wildcard mail acceptance on servicename@customdomain.com takes the crown if you’re setting this up fresh!
Comment by CubsFan1060 6 hours ago
Comment by kevin_thibedeau 4 hours ago
Comment by tianqi 2 hours ago
Comment by TacticalCoder 6 hours ago
My email, over two decades+ (2004?), hasn't been in a many public leaks (only one on https://haveibeenpwned.com/ ) but obviously has made its way to various spammy actors but thankfully nearly everything is caught by GMail's spam filter.
If anything I'd say GMail's spam filter works too well: I get more legit emails in my spam folder than spam in my regular inbox. As in: one in a rare while vs about zero spam in my regular inbox.
Comment by Aboutplants 7 hours ago
Comment by jeffbee 7 hours ago
FWIW, I am not seeing this. My Spam label contains just spam.
Finally, it would be good to know what you are observing. Are you seeing this as recipient or sender?
Comment by goopthink 7 hours ago
- Emails are being aggressively marked as “suspicious” out of the blue (USPS, HR emails, system emails, promotional emails)
- Those emails are being regularly delayed by 7-10 minutes.
- Priority inbox rules seem reset
- “Never mark as spam” rules are seemingly not respected
Additional reports on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/GMail/comments/1qln9zp/gmail_not_fi...
Comment by jeffbee 7 hours ago
Added: https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/incidents/NNnDkY...
Comment by ianberdin 4 hours ago
Comment by buildbot 7 hours ago
Comment by jokethrowaway 4 hours ago
I had to make a bunch of filters on my side.
One more reason to migrate to Proton
Comment by j45 5 hours ago
It might be a new round of AI training featuring the labour of customers as free employees doing training. Every time we click, we consent to sharing private email data.
Comment by tonymet 6 hours ago
Comment by tonymet 1 hour ago
Comment by VLM 6 hours ago
Its really slow. Too slow to use 2FA or in some cases, verify email addresses or recover passwords.
Most people can't handle a notification on their watch every minute, or several spam every five minutes, so "large numbers of people" are shutting off notifications on their phones. And human nature being what it is, they're not going to be turned back on again. So the era of getting a notification when you get an email is coming to a close. "Important Immediate Attention Stuff" moved to text messages a long time ago anyway, at least for me. The list of technologies you can no longer reach me on, always increases over time...
Comment by greesil 5 hours ago
Comment by DANmode 3 hours ago
Only answer numbers you recognize, everyone else gets voicemail.
Cell phone spam is a 10 year+ old memory for me.
Comment by cabirum 6 hours ago
Comment by blell 5 hours ago
Comment by Waterluvian 5 hours ago
Comment by SoftTalker 5 hours ago
Phishing is tricker because it can be very deceptive especially if you're being targeted specifically. But also usually pretty obvious.
Comment by PaulDavisThe1st 5 hours ago
* Are you available? * Paul, can we have a zoom meeting with you on Monday? * Assistance for donation * Greetings!!! * some ideas for you * Refund request * Somethings not working * Manuel Montoya for roof work contractor * proposals for print * Invite Connection
Half of the above are actual spam, half are not. Tell me which is which ...
Comment by SoftTalker 1 hour ago
Comment by chistev 5 hours ago
Comment by plagiarist 5 hours ago
Comment by Nextgrid 4 hours ago
For spam which only does not require manual effort on the other side, there is no reason to filter out potential victims and all the more reason to make it look as legit as possible to maximize conversion rates.
Comment by takanot 2 hours ago
Unless there's a trade-off. Saying "respond now or your account will be erased!" doesn't sound very legit. But the number of additional victims the phisher gets by doing probably outweighs the number of more sophisticated victims he loses.
Comment by DANmode 3 hours ago
You cannot 100% tell from others’ subject lines,
if you don’t know them personally.
Comment by SoftTalker 1 hour ago