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Ask HN: Anyone else start getting legit emails marked as spam in Gmail?

6 points by vaksel ↗ HN
I use Google Apps for my email and I've started seeing this a lot recently.

Before pretty much all the legit emails always made it through to my inbox unharmed...and now not a day goes by, that I don't find a legit email false flagged as spam by Google.

Even those emails that I marked as "not spam" keep going there. And even people I've emailed back and forth with for years, are now getting caught by the spam filter.

Has anyone else start seeing this lately?

7 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 41.3 ms ] thread
sbierwagen
Nope.

I use priority inbox, though, which seems to permanently whitelist email from an address marked "important".

toddkaufmann
Not really any change. I just checked, and from about a month of spam, there were maybe 2 messages (semi-junk from web sites that I wouldn't really miss) out of 110. I usually do check (though not necessarily empty) the spam more frequently.

I am not sure of the details of Google's spam ranking algorithm. The opposite thing: what if spammers marked everything in their spam box as "not spam" ? Actually, I don't think spam needs to do this. It already is using an extremely efficient natural-selection tool: the human brain.

You could just be a victim of a slight variation in the changing spam entropy, as some type of message similar to your emails becomes more spammy. Without a tool to show the actual scores of messages, asking here is probably the best you can do. (If there was a tool, it would only encourage gaming the system more.)

arn
fwiw, I've always found google's spam filters too sensitive for my tastes. I use a pay service I like (spamstopshere.com)
aginn
I have. Some of my team has been sending me emails and I have not been receiving them. First Amazon Cloud, then PS3 Network, then LastPass,now Gmail... is our world falling apart?
mvalle
I had an email from Google(docs) go to the gmail spam folder.
hansy
Does Google's algorithm somehow take into account how often you delete something from your inbox?

I am still subscribed to my old company's newsletter, and before, I used to like staying updated with whatever was going on there. Now every time I get a newsletter I instinctively just trash it without opening it.

Lately, I noticed that the newsletters are going straight to the spam box.

ScottWhigham
I'm not sure - there has been a 3-5x increase in the number of spam emails in the Spam filter for me since around the beginning of the year. As a result I just don't look as intently anymore.

I caught a SoundCloud email in the Spam the other day and rescued it.