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Has something gone awry with Gmail's spam filters?

2 points by willmadden ↗ HN
The last week or two I've been absolutely inundated with obvious spam emails to gmail. These emails have blocks of similar email addresses in the "To" and "CC" lines and are blatant phishing attempts and/or attempts to get you to "unsubscribe" to verify the email address is in use.

I'm curious if anyone else has experienced this with google mail recently, and if something has gone wrong with their spam filters.

3 comments

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entrepy123
On topic, I have been getting some "Amazon email 2fac code" spam/phishing attempts in Gmail, coming from AmazonSES but not matching legitimate Amazon.com (the store) "email 2fac code" mails. So, that's spam not getting filtered correctly in my eyes. About 3-5 such messages overall in the last few weeks.

Slightly off topic, Gmail search has been very slow (for Gmail) the past month or so, for me. It used to be wicked fast, and I guess I got used to that. Maybe because my Gmail box is creeping closer to "capacity"?

IDK if these issue are related, but if they are, maybe Gmail is not being maintained as meticulously as it used to be?

willmadden
I think there's no doubt it's not as well maintained. Is it really that hard for Google to use a tiny bit of their computing power and machine learning to send these bulk spam emails to the junk folder?

I've had to create filters to stop spammers because they don't allow you to block enough email addresses. They haven't released a useful feature in I don't know how many years.

jfengel
Nope. Gmail spam filter has been working very well for me, and has been for a long time.

Sorry to hear it's sucking for you, but I'm not seeing the same thing. I do see a few phishing attempts in the spam folder, but the vast majority of them get dropped on the floor before that. (I only know because my spam folder used to contain tens of thousands of messages, and now it has mere dozens.)