Ask HN: Has Gmail spam blocking taken a sudden nosedive?

I see these on my yahoo email often with weird fonts. I have yet to see any in my gmail account.

I have similar ones:

PersonalLoanforYou (sent from Personal Loan Pro <pedrojoilmaantonio@gmail.com)

𝐃𝐨𝐧'𝐭 𝐥𝐞𝐭 𝐡𝐢𝐠𝐡_𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐃𝐞𝐛𝐭 𝐑𝐮𝐧𝐔𝐩 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐞 (sent from Personal Loan <xarthostalorr@gmail.com>)

The common thread appears to be that they are sent from gmail addresses. It could be that they are using a tool like Gmass (https://www.gmass.co/) that lets you send bulk email from Gmail by batching them in groups of 500 per day. Mail originating from Gmail must have a lower spam flag rate.

For me gmail spam blocking has been doing quite the opposite, putting legit customer emails in spam that I had to create a filter to not mark anything as spam. The current approach to email filtering is not very good to be honest.

Just looked into my spam folder and it seems that they have added a hook icon to the phishing emails. Took me a while to figure out, almost opened one out of curiosity!

So much low effort spam is making it through. I've had actual 90s era "help an inconvenienced Nigerian Prince" spam in my inbox several times the past few months

I had an empty mail saying Good Morning in the subject today.

Generally it seems like a few more things can get through, compared to 10+ years ago. I'm thinking just bugs sneaking in the codebase over a long period of time.

I get plenty of Russian spam because I visited Russia and connected to the free wifi of the airport. Apparently the list of people connecting to wifi (or someone who they're reselling their data to) is easily hackable.

Somehow they evaded Google for a long time. For a period they were pretty successful with Google Drive / Google Calendar invitations containing spam, but Google blocked them - then I got a string of emails. After a bit of flagging I stopped seeing them.

I also get some false positives flagged as spam so I started keeping my spam folder clean, so I can inspect what spam I receive and whether it's spam or just a service Google doesn't like.

I interact with people at Yandex and their emails often end up in spam, no idea why. They're perfectly legit mails.

Some forums also are regularly ending up in spam.

Yes, same here. For many years, I got like 0-10 messages in my Spam folder per week.

Then suddenly in maybe mid-December, an absolute flood started. I started getting at least 100 messages every day in Spam. Many of them were similar to each other, and nearly all of them were obvious spam like you say.

In the last week or two, the volume has decreased again to maybe 10-25 per day. I don't know if the spammers slowed down or Google tweaked something.

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Also, does Gmail route some spam to /dev/null and other spam to Spam? I somehow have the impression that it does.

That is, rather than doing a basic 2-way categorization (non-spam -> Inbox, spam -> Spam), it could be doing a 3-way categorization (non-spam -> Inbox, confidently spam -> Spam, undoubtedly spam -> /dev/null).

If so, I wonder if the issue could be with the confidently vs. undoubtedly categorization rather than necessarily an increase in total spam.

Yes. Yesterday. It's probably an A/B experiment went astray, or old learned rules got flushed and needed to relearn over time. Couple months back it was pretty bad. Almost daily for couple weeks.

Gmail is also a huge source of spam for me.

The canned response of Gmail Twitter account when I reported a similar issue earlier today:

> Our team is working on this issue. Meanwhile, have a look at this article to mark the emails as spam in Gmail

https://twitter.com/gmail/status/1480816476458262530

For me it started at the beginning of 2021. I still get the most obvious kind of spam. From Bitcoin to Paypal to USPS. About 100 messages a week. Before, I used to delete them, but they just kept coming, so I decided to let them sit there. At one point I had more than 1000, when before 2021 I had less than 10. Now I'm down to about 430. I think the system deletes spam after 30 days. So at least that thing works.

I get a lot of french dating site spam (?) my custom filters are ever-evolving, but also I get less and less needed email. Things I need are automated so I check less and less, and have less need for it. Wonder if less users or less importance of email leads to less prioritization for email providers.

Yup same here. So many for Shoppers Drug Mart or other silliness. They’re very clearly fake and have all the tell-tale signs of spam that Google used to properly filter for me. I’m very surprised at the recent drop in quality and it’s had me looking at other providers.

I don't check my spam folder so I can't say if that has increased in volume.

I do know I now get 3-4 obvious spam mails landing in my actual inbox. This started maybe three months ago.

I had a legit mail end up in spam last month, and one just today.

Never happened before.

I'm getting that crap too. I just got 2 today.

Yes. Lots of cigarette spam lately.

In case anyone from Gmail is reading: we need a block button that blocks an email address from the inbox, and also deletes the email (i.e. it doesn't park the email in spam, as is the current practice). There are two domains that send me constant emails: Chopra.com (Deepak Chopra's website), and ICICI (an Indian bank). The emails from both domains contain "unsubscribe" buttons that don't work (I think they do this on purpose... my experience with Chopra.com has been that it's an unethical organization).

Currently, the block button parks the emails in the spam folder. And I wake up every day to 3 emails from Chopra.com, and 5 from ICICI, in my spam folder. Even though it's the spam folder, it's still draining.

I have been getting a lot of legit email going to spam, and a lot of what appears to be obvious spam coming to my inbox... In the last week or so.. I though I was going crazy, but apparently my meds are still working

I'm getting a lot of false positives too. Just because I hit delete on unread messages that are simply notifications from x services, which I already know about because I saw the push notification for them.

I've never seen bold text formatting in an HN post, how do you do that? test #test# *test*

𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫'𝐥𝐨𝐚𝐧-𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧

I've been getting emails like the last one in my university inbox (Gmail-powered) for months now. They always follow the same format: a Vietnamese-sounding name (correct me if I'm wrong about that), followed by a 4-ish digit number. Most were going straight to my inbox instead of my spam folder.

I cut a support ticket to the university IT team, asking if they had turned off spam filters or something. It just seemed very unlikely Gmail would not detect them as spam. I think it's gotten better recently, but I don't open that account a lot since I avoid Google like the plague.

EDIT: to add to that, many of them had subjects that started with a green heart emoji. I was super disappointed that Gmail didn't let me create a filter based on that to at least delete them.

3 months ago every political email started getting through Gmail's spam filter all of the sudden. I've marked hundreds as spam, and the filter still lets some through.

It appears so. About an year ago I started getting the most obvious spam messages directly to my inbox. I have been using my current gmail account for more than 16 years now and I've never received such low effort spam messages before. Obviously there was a specific change in gmail's side and I am really hoping it's temporary, but it has been too long that I've been receiving spam in my inbox and I'm really annoyed, even planning on just abandoning my email address and looking for another provider.

I too have seen these, generally my subject matters are insurance of some sort from one of the “Mutuals”, despite having not received any legitimate emails in this category for years.

I can’t imagine how these are slipping through, particularly with the consistent random characters at end of the subject line.

What gives??