Ask HN: Gmail having spam problems for anybody else?

60 points by simlan 3 years ago | 42 comments

This week I had 7 spam E-Mails actually hitting my Gmail inbox. Obviously reported them all and they are still coming through. Now the theme changed from FedEx to Viagra and it keeps coming. I was with this service for 15 years and can not recall a year I had as many spam Mails hitting my inbox in the whole year. Is this an isolated incident or does anybody else have problems. I can not find anything reporting this so maybe I fucked up and spilled my address to one of the more skilled networks.

moosedev 3 years ago |

Something radically changed for me 7-10 days ago, wherein certain non-spam but clearly not-inbox-worthy emails are now consistently hitting the Inbox, often with the "Important according to Google magic" flag set.

Examples: A clearly promotional email from a manufacturer announcing new products, a special offer from a hotel I stayed at once 7 years ago, every single breaking news email from the Seattle Times.

FWIW, I'm not seeing proper spam by the old-school definition breaching the Inbox (Viagra, replica Rolex, et al). I guess that's good.

Still feels like something significant broke very recently, but tbh I'd already lost faith in Gmail's classification after seeing how many genuine emails end up in Spam the last 3-5 years. It's particularly painful to watch in light of how far other applications of ML have advanced since ole' Gmail was state-of-the-art. In other words: shouldn't Google (disclosure: my former employer) be much, much better at this?

temp_account_32 3 years ago | |

I've had the exact same experience in the past few days, and often the attachments contain malware

IG_Semmelweiss 3 years ago |

I have seen this.

The issue is that you get added to some sort of list. The sender is from a spam domain that keeps changing so it cannot be blocked.

Im not sure how it happened. But a loved one is affected. I have the persons email open on my pc so I monitor it. My loved one receives phising emails from Norton , FedEx etc impersonators constantly. Script is "his subscription (package) etc will not renew unless he pays". If he replies, then they call and take the cc over the phone.

The person is very gullible to these sort of emails. Ive tried to get them deleted before they hit the inbox.

It is relentless. Ive set up a long list of email filters... but some still get thru.

Im not a developer but i did take many CS classes at school and coded in java. I know how tonuse filters . I've tried to whois and tried going to the hoster, or the email provider, to get this sender banned. Its usually an entity in Poland or Ukraine that chooses to let this happen.

id love to known What else I can do

mikequinlan 3 years ago | |

I have set up a whitelist for a friend. Only emails from people she expects to receive emails from end up in her inbox; everything else goes into a 'to be reviewed' folder.

Jeremy1026 3 years ago |

We’re having the opposite problem. Our confirmation emails are getting marked as spam, despite them very much not being spam, nor having their content change over the last few years.

abnercoimbre 3 years ago | |

This happens with our indie conference [0] every year! It's so frustrating! Our domain passes all DKIM and SPF record checks. If you inspect the email headers it's all valid.

Our stuff gets sent to Gmail spam and the business suffers for it.

[0] https://handmade-seattle.com

shortcake27 3 years ago |

Yeah I’ve been getting loads of spam hitting my inbox. It’s actually hilarious, email addresses such as “whhdjsjwjsjbxjejwjabdjeje@mail.ru” with the subject “Free Yeti Hopper” and yet Google can’t identify it as spam.

The good news is that in my case, there are patterns I can filter. I’ve set up about 30 filters so far to automatically delete such emails. Works great. I recommend using exact matching (double quotes) to avoid false positives. I really need to move away from Gmail, but filters are _awesome_.

Euphorbium 3 years ago | |

I too am getting the same kind of spam in my inbox. And it is coming from gmail addresses, or at least appears like that. Seems like hello world difficulty machine learning filter should be catching those with 99% success. My theory is that google decided to boot me off the service as I am unprofitable and use up their free resources to the fullest.

IG_Semmelweiss 3 years ago | |

Can you pls explain how you filter? In my experience the sender

whhdjsjwjsjbxjejwjabdjeje@mail.ru

Is never the same. Not the domain. Not the sender. How do you filter a sender that keeps changing into random characters, if the subject or content is also changing?

shortcake27 3 years ago | | |

I just meant it's funny Gmail can't identify an email address where the spammer has just mashed the keyboard. Usually there's some kind of pattern in the senders name, subject, or content, and you can match on multiple fields. For example, here's one of my filters:

  from:("Dicks sporting goods"|DicksSportingGoods|"Dicks SportingGoods") (yeti|makita)

cmeacham98 3 years ago | | |

They're not filtering based on sender, they're filtering based on words/phrases in the spam itself that do not appear in legit email.

simlan 3 years ago | |

Interesting my cases supposedly came from some .edu or other educational related TLDs at first then it devolved into randoms... Well I will need to monitor and maybe do my own rules as well.

pifm_guy 3 years ago | |

I just filtered for the word yeti.

I don't want a yeti hopper...

flangola7 3 years ago |

Every time I read about running your own email server, operators warn that it is extremely hard to have your emails reliably make it into the inbox of a Gmail or Outlook user and not go to spam (or worse, silently dropped). You can set up all of DMARC, SPF, etc. and establish a clean domain and IP history and it will still be luck of the draw.

Yet obvious junk like OP is experiencing makes it through. I don't know what to think about it.

sp332 3 years ago |

Yes. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

And it has spread to malware in ads as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34641025

simlan 3 years ago | |

Thanks for that. There is some mention of spam but others complaining that Gmail is too tight with their filters... Maybe they are re-adjusting.

sp332 3 years ago | | |

Being tighter or looser doesn't help much if the filters aren't tuned right. You can get too much spam in your inbox and too much good email in your spam folder at the same time.

juliennakache 3 years ago |

Same here I keep getting the same spam from ACE Hardware. I've been reporting it a couple of months now but they keep coming in. It's weird.

getpost 3 years ago |

For me there's no increase in spam delivered to my inbox.

But, for years, emails from regular correspondents are marked as spam. I have to make rules to ensure I get non-spam emails.

Gmail doesn't seem to learn from interactive choices. Did it ever? Emails I manually designate as spam aren't considered spam in the future.

khaki54 3 years ago |

It seems like they string together a whole bunch of evasions.

1. insert a bunch of antispam headers like they've been "ok'd" by microsoft

2. Large sections of the decoded message are in french, sometimes even if the message appears to be russian

3. They pass DKIM

4. All the links use URL shorteners, but that contain unencoded special characters that probably break any attempt at following the links

5. I think this is the key one: they seem to base64 encode sections of the emails, but mark them as hex. So perhaps the browser / mail client can render despite the error but the spam detector has a more strict interpretation and it just looks like junk and gives up.

6. Some of these you can't actually even filter against because the searchable text (pre decode) is near minimal and there is nothing to key off of.

pifm_guy 3 years ago | |

All of those things look pretty 'fixable' in the game of cat and mouse ...

khaki54 3 years ago | | |

You would think so. Some of the messages sit in my inbox for an hour, trigger the "important message" feature so I get a notification, then gets moved to spam when google gets more info

josefresco 3 years ago |

Seems like an uptick. I'm getting 4-5 now daily that are passing the spam filter whereas previously it would be 4-5 a week. Use both Google Workspace and free Gmail.

sysadmin21 3 years ago |

Yes, quite a few emails which are exceedingly clearly spam.

simlan 3 years ago | |

"fedex" by any chance ?

actsasbuffoon 3 years ago | | |

Yes, plus a bunch of other retailers. I keep marking them as spam, but Google isn’t getting the hint. This has been going on for months now and I’m strongly considering switching my personal email over to a new service.

I don’t understand how GMail has dropped so severely in quality. These are some of the most obvious spam messages I have ever seen.

peter_d_sherman 3 years ago |

You're not alone!

I've seen this effect as well!

For some reason, of late, Gmail seems to be less successful in blocking spam emails than it historically has been...

Not sure why exactly that is -- other posters seem to have a better understanding of the root causes of the phenomenon than I do -- but one thing is for sure, and that is that you're not alone!

manuelabeledo 3 years ago |

Geek Squad "invoices", anyone?

It is mildly infuriating that I have to periodically check my spam folder, looking for things like insurance claim updates, credit card bills, etc., yet the filter is bad enough to let emails from addresses like "whatever_somenumber@gmail.com" through, with the most outrageous PDF documents attached.

nubinetwork 3 years ago | |

I get those on my ISP email, but sadly nowhere else.

IceHegel 3 years ago |

Has been bad for the last 2 years for me. Used to have 0 and now I get 5 or 6 obvious spam messages in my inbox a week.

pcdoodle 3 years ago |

And yet we run into situations where customers gmail us and we can't reply. Gmail is not email.

dswilkerson 3 years ago |

I have had a large amount of spam in my gmail for months now. A friend of mine works at Google, but not on the gmail team. I asked him if there would be any point to telling the gmail team that their spam filtering is now much worse. He said no.

berdon 3 years ago |

Yes, probably for the last 3 years. I switched to Fastmail for everything but continue to monitor the old gmail account. It now only gets the spam emails. Reporting as spam or phishing has never blocked anything.

I can’t recommend Fastmail enough.

nubinetwork 3 years ago |

I don't get a lot of spam to my Gmail surprisingly, but I had one 3 days ago in my inbox with only a picture attached inline... based on the filename, it sounds like an invoice scam (I didn't open it).

simlan 3 years ago | |

That is exactly my experience as well. Nothing noticeable for years and then a quite obvious one and it kept coming after that.

blakesterz 3 years ago |

Nope, not any changes here, but I'm on the paid thing, Workspaces or whatever they call it this month. I've seen other people writing about it, but I'm not seeing any misses at all.

wetpaws 3 years ago |

A huge burst of spam recently, although it got a bit better for the last couple of weeks. Even had to file a bug report/complaint to G.

Sakos 3 years ago |

It's been interesting. Fastmail continues to be effective in filtering out spam, but Gmail seems to be faltering as of recently.

Barrin92 3 years ago |

true for me as well. I'm getting tons of fake UPS emails and for some reason emails from the "The National Wild Turkey Federation" which is odd because I've never hunted a turkey and I'm not even American. Also I'm not convinced the "Report Spam" button actually does anything.

tomcam 3 years ago |

Dramatic increase in the last 6 months or so. Still infinitely better than not having their spam protection.

Operyl 3 years ago |

Yup, I have seen a significant uptick of spam on my Google Workspaces accounts.

alexgrover 3 years ago |

Yep, been having similar issues for ~6 months.