Ask HN: Gmail having spam problems for anybody else?

Examples: A clearly promotional email from a manufacturer announcing new products, a special offer from a hotel I stayed at once 7 years ago, every single breaking news email from the Seattle Times.

FWIW, I'm not seeing proper spam by the old-school definition breaching the Inbox (Viagra, replica Rolex, et al). I guess that's good.

Still feels like something significant broke very recently, but tbh I'd already lost faith in Gmail's classification after seeing how many genuine emails end up in Spam the last 3-5 years. It's particularly painful to watch in light of how far other applications of ML have advanced since ole' Gmail was state-of-the-art. In other words: shouldn't Google (disclosure: my former employer) be much, much better at this?

The issue is that you get added to some sort of list. The sender is from a spam domain that keeps changing so it cannot be blocked.

Im not sure how it happened. But a loved one is affected. I have the persons email open on my pc so I monitor it. My loved one receives phising emails from Norton , FedEx etc impersonators constantly. Script is "his subscription (package) etc will not renew unless he pays". If he replies, then they call and take the cc over the phone.

The person is very gullible to these sort of emails. Ive tried to get them deleted before they hit the inbox.

It is relentless. Ive set up a long list of email filters... but some still get thru.

Im not a developer but i did take many CS classes at school and coded in java. I know how tonuse filters . I've tried to whois and tried going to the hoster, or the email provider, to get this sender banned. Its usually an entity in Poland or Ukraine that chooses to let this happen.

id love to known What else I can do

The good news is that in my case, there are patterns I can filter. I’ve set up about 30 filters so far to automatically delete such emails. Works great. I recommend using exact matching (double quotes) to avoid false positives. I really need to move away from Gmail, but filters are _awesome_.

Yet obvious junk like OP is experiencing makes it through. I don't know what to think about it.

And it has spread to malware in ads as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34641025

But, for years, emails from regular correspondents are marked as spam. I have to make rules to ensure I get non-spam emails.

Gmail doesn't seem to learn from interactive choices. Did it ever? Emails I manually designate as spam aren't considered spam in the future.

1. insert a bunch of antispam headers like they've been "ok'd" by microsoft

2. Large sections of the decoded message are in french, sometimes even if the message appears to be russian

3. They pass DKIM

4. All the links use URL shorteners, but that contain unencoded special characters that probably break any attempt at following the links

5. I think this is the key one: they seem to base64 encode sections of the emails, but mark them as hex. So perhaps the browser / mail client can render despite the error but the spam detector has a more strict interpretation and it just looks like junk and gives up.

6. Some of these you can't actually even filter against because the searchable text (pre decode) is near minimal and there is nothing to key off of.

I've seen this effect as well!

For some reason, of late, Gmail seems to be less successful in blocking spam emails than it historically has been...

Not sure why exactly that is -- other posters seem to have a better understanding of the root causes of the phenomenon than I do -- but one thing is for sure, and that is that you're not alone!

It is mildly infuriating that I have to periodically check my spam folder, looking for things like insurance claim updates, credit card bills, etc., yet the filter is bad enough to let emails from addresses like "whatever_somenumber@gmail.com" through, with the most outrageous PDF documents attached.

I can’t recommend Fastmail enough.