Ask HN: Spammers got smarter or Gmail is no longer good? How on earth this email passed the spam filter?
https://ibb.co/4PrjH9V Recently I am getting more and more of these emails in my inbox. |
Ask HN: Spammers got smarter or Gmail is no longer good? How on earth this email passed the spam filter?
https://ibb.co/4PrjH9V Recently I am getting more and more of these emails in my inbox. |
What I get instead is that half of the messages in the spam folder are not spam.
This is actually even worse than just not having spam filtering. I still have to pick the spam out manually and ignore/delete it, but now I have to check two folders every day instead of one.
I agree that positively approving contacts is a great way to avoid the threat of spam, but that concept does have occasional downsides.
My fastmail account has been a great alternative, but for many reasons I can't totally drop the gmail account
Even many emails from GitHub issues tracker were shoved into Spam erroneously.
The "not spam" button is not working very well so far this year and I'm clicking the same kind of email dozens of times as Not Spam but this is flaky and not a reliable method.
What DOES work as a manual patch to fix this, is create a Filter for a domain or email address you trust and tick the filter option to Never Mark as Spam.
Time to leave Gmail anyway...
I've just finished reading about the process before I begin moving a dozen grandfathered personal and my SMB client domains from gmail over to Fastmail.
Fastmail is going to be much better value than gmail (once these previously grandfathered free domains are no longer free with gmail any more).
Fastmail Seive plus Dropbox integration looks really powerful and I'm keen to try it.
Fastmail Reseller Account is the practical way forward for a better value feature-set.
Moving DNS hosting to Fastmail also...
A change in the Google's antispam algorithms (is it still blacklisting?) might be the cause, and I additionally suspect the spam mails' extensive use of latin-looking unicode characters to evade the filters.
Early on, a client of ours had a domain receiving literally hundreds of thousands to millions of spam a day. Commercial filters were ineffective, the domain was unusable for their common addresses, only thing that worked was /dev/null. On a hunch, we tried moving it to paid Google Apps for Your Domain, which proved staggeringly effective: 100% of spam were filtered, zero false positives.
One thing we learned: turns out Google does have human support engineers / SREs who really badly want to speak to you live if you’re generating meaningfully visible load w/o violating any terms of service. :-)
Today, on a diff @gmail.com account (in public records dating back to launch) that got no spam in the Inbox then despite hundreds in the spam folder a day, gets hundreds a day in the inbox today, same amount in the spam folder. No idea how many are filtered before even hitting spam folder though. Could be that hundreds in the inbox and thousands in the spam folder are just the long tail noise of billions filtered before delivery? Afraid to move it to find out!
Obviously something's going on with gmail and I am still not sure what is, but it's definitely not a bug (it has been like this for too long now) and the spammers definitely didn't get smarter (caricature like spam messages).
Does anyone know if Google has recently started offering some paid spam protection or something?
I never have problems with gmail+spam otherwise.
It's not any great loss, I just kept it as an alternate address for when I needed to send email to someone (or vice versa) and over-enthusiastic mail admins decided to "fight spam" by blocking entire top-level domains or countries.