Ask HN: Is Spam getting worse or is Gmail getting worse?

10 pointsadamtaylor_1312d ago9 comments

Over the past couple of months I've noticed that number of spam emails landing in my inbox has increased by quite a bit. I keep a very tidy inbox, so it's pretty easy for me to notice them and mark them as spam. But I'm curious: is Google just getting worse at detecting spam, or is the spam somehow evolving?

For example, I just got this email:

Sender: william_brown_318@rofopifj.dravixa.space Subject: the wagon is in

The body contains tons of literal HTML tags that weren't parsed into actual HTML. Not sure if it was sent as a text mime-type or what, but it takes all of 2 whole seconds for me to mentally note that this is spam.

How is this getting through more often these days?

9 comments

is_true10d ago

For me the opposite is happening. More emails are getting flagged that aren't spam.

dormento12d ago

Unfortunately, this is one of those questions that can be jokingly answered with an inclusive "or". The two things can be true at the same time.

(Just like their web search, which I'm pretty sure had to die so they could prop up their AI offerings).

cyanydeez11d ago

google search died before AI. It became obvious to google that to make money, they needed to not offer the best answer to a query, because then you'd just click on the ads.

punyaatloomavi12d ago

OK, I had not really noticed this but now when you say this, I see a pattern yes think I do see more spams in my inbox lately and I thought maybe it’s me giving out my email everywhere.

JojoFatsani12d ago

They seem to have buried the report spam and report phishing functions in right-click menus. They used to be very easy to hit. I'm sure that is reducing signals to the spam algorithm.

SyntaxErrorist12d ago

It feels like we are hitting a point where AI generated variations are scaling faster that the traditional bayesian filters can adapt.

drsalt12d ago

dude they can't do something as simple as sort by subject or sender. you think they're going to block spam?

dhruv300612d ago

WhatsApp is so so spammy.

PaulHoule12d ago

Yes.

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