Ask HN: Why are Gmail filters so bad?

3 points by Crazyontap 1 year ago | 3 comments

So I got a phishing email from AWS billing where the sender's email was "support@moyuchet.kz".

It landed right in my primary inbox.

Recently a lot of high profile accounts have been hacked (Linus tech tips, Jim browning, etc) like this.

It makes you wonder with all the technology, SPF, DKIM, A.I., etc - big companies like gmail still can't catch such obvious scams.

On the other hand a lot of legitimate email from my Bank has often get sent to spam.

I'm no email expert but is it really that hard to catch such obvious scams by the email client where they know if the sender really isn't Twitter, AWS, etc? Why is email so broken?

sgbeal 1 year ago |

> So I got a phishing email ... It landed right in my primary inbox.

FWIW, i've been using gmail since 2006 or 7 and i get maybe (MAYBE) one such mail in my mailbox every 3-4 months. Until spam inexplicably dropped by 90%+ practically overnight sometime in the past 5-ish years, i was getting an average of 100 spams per day, very, very, _very_ few of which landed in my inbox because gmail's filters are so incredibly good. Before gmail, email was essentially unusable for me because the noise-to-signal ratio was easily 10-to-1. (Nowadays, i get maybe 3-5 spam per day (in my spam box), but i've no clue what caused the sudden sharp decline a handful of years ago.)

> Recently a lot of high profile accounts have been hacked (Linus tech tips, Jim browning, etc) like this.

Then, frankly, those users need to learn not to click on everything which lands in their inbox. They have certainly learned that now.

> On the other hand a lot of legitimate email from my Bank has often get sent to spam.

If your bank is using email for notifications then "they're doing it wrong." i've been with my bank since the late 90s, using online banking since the early 2000s, and they've literally never once sent me an email.

smt88 1 year ago |

Gmail's filters are the most tested and targeted by spammers. Switch to a different provider. Fastmail is better in my experience.

bell-cot 1 year ago |

Running scams is a very profitable business; compliance with DKIM, DMARC, SPF, etc. anti-spam standards only adds some minimal overhead. Scammers checking and tuning their messages to penetrate various anti-spam defenses probably costs more...but I'm sure there are AAS versions of that, these days. So that's just another "what's the RoI?" decision.

Vs. what does GMail's RoI look like, if they spend a few $million more on spam/scam filters? Even for the paid GMail accounts, how many customer decision makers actually care?