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Ask HN: Why Is Gmail Spam Filtering .gov?

2 points by lvs ↗ HN
Gmail recently began aggressively spam filtering emails from US government agencies with .gov addresses, as well as .com addresses from major US and multinational corporations. Aside from setting up filters manually, this change is destroying the value proposition of using Gmail for important communications.

What change caused this, and why can't Google be contacted in any communication channel when things break? It's dangerous and irresponsible to spam filter .gov!

6 comments

[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 25.6 ms ] thread
LinuxBender
Have you checked the email headers to see if they give any clues why they are tagging the emails as spam? There are a few sites that talk about reading the headers. [1]

[1] - https://emailheaders.net/gmail.html

lvs
Thanks. It looks like it's probably DKIM and DMARC failures in general, but I can't solve these problems for the sending domains. Some heavy-handed crackdown on best-practices is not helping anyone, if that's what's happened here. I need to receive the fucking emails in my inbox.

I'll just have to continue my migration off Google products. Too much power in the hands of people too irresponsible to wield it. Google should not be able to flip a switch and decide that my government can't communicate with me.

pwg
Keep in mind that just because an email purports to be from a .gov address, that does not mean it is authentic.

It is trivial to send an email with any address you like as the from value. So this may be a response on google's part to the irs scammers (and other 'govt' scamming artists) sending out spam emails with .gov from addresses to give them a fake appearance of authenticity.

lvs
Surely that's some of the motivation for aggressive spam filtering, but I am seeing this on very legitimate and anticipated emails. In fact, in some cases I get replies sent to spam despite the fact that I've sent outgoing mail in the same thread! Something is broken...
ctrlaltdev
Gmail filters way more than it is supposed to do. You can have a valid DKIM and DMARC and still be filtered out if your mail server doesn't rank high enough in their list.

And I'd like to specify that I'm talking about inter-personal casual communication - nothing commercial, not link, no attachments.

I have to request a proof of reading to be sure my emails get through with GMail.

uberman
Are you suggesting that by definition spam cannot be sent from an edu domain?