Ask HN: Gmail spam filtering suddenly marking everything as spam? Almost all transactional emails are being marked as suspicious even when their SPF/DKIM records are fine and they’ve been whitelisted before. Did Google break something in gmail/spam filtering? |
This is very easy and straightforward. I operate 6 Gmail accounts, and three are "alts" where I've basically never given the address out to anyone at all, and they receive zero spam, zero UCE, zero marketing emails.
Of course, on my "main" I've disclosed the address to many entities and I use it for sign-in and shipping and many things. And yes, I do receive spam and scam emails there, but wcyd?
After a few years of updating addresses that I’d missed whenever something showed up that was forwarded from my old gmail account, I shut down my old account.
No more spam, whenever I start receiving spam to a Hide My Email address, I deactivate it.
(I don't much care because the account was just used for interacting with somebody else's Google-hosted junk but, if I had been using it for something serious, I have probably been frustrated.)
Rarely does more than one per day show up in my main inbox.
Why should I care who has my email address?
I now never get good email in the spam folder, and never get undetected spam in the inbox, and very occasionally get a spam erroneously rescued, but still visually flagged as iffy-but-maybe-ham.
If Gmail has been lax at filtering spam lately, I haven’t noticed, but perhaps the Bayesian filter has been picking up the slack.
My email, over two decades+ (2004?), hasn't been in a many public leaks (only one on https://haveibeenpwned.com/ ) but obviously has made its way to various spammy actors but thankfully nearly everything is caught by GMail's spam filter.
If anything I'd say GMail's spam filter works too well: I get more legit emails in my spam folder than spam in my regular inbox. As in: one in a rare while vs about zero spam in my regular inbox.
Only answer numbers you recognize, everyone else gets voicemail.
Cell phone spam is a 10 year+ old memory for me.
Phishing is tricker because it can be very deceptive especially if you're being targeted specifically. But also usually pretty obvious.
* Are you available? * Paul, can we have a zoom meeting with you on Monday? * Assistance for donation * Greetings!!! * some ideas for you * Refund request * Somethings not working * Manuel Montoya for roof work contractor * proposals for print * Invite Connection
Half of the above are actual spam, half are not. Tell me which is which ...
* Paul, can we have a zoom meeting with you on Monday?
* Assistance for donation
* Greetings!!!
* Invite Connection
* Refund request
You cannot 100% tell from others’ subject lines,
if you don’t know them personally.
I use them for different purposes. They are "role accounts" for projects I am doing, such as geneaology and astronomy.
In order to use YouTube sanely, and store different stuff in Drive, I separate them into unique accounts. I use those accounts for specific things, and my YouTube subscriptions, playlists, etc. are tailored for each role, for example.
This is not about email at all. Obviously, I can access all those email accounts through the one app on my smartphone or the one PWA on my Chromebook. They are easily manageable but separate.
I also run 3 Outlook/Microsoft accounts, and for the same reason. (One of them is my academic account from community college, and the other two are personal.)
I don't need to give out email addresses for the "role accounts" except where I "Sign In With Google" to various services. So I don't really send/receive email from them at all, except where I'm sharing links or documents with myself (the best way to do this cross-account is still by using email, oftentimes.)
It’s past patterns + live human weighting.
In fact, this is plainly evident by the way they give you tools to operate them in a systematic way. You can add multiple accounts to a single Android "user". You can add them to a single Google Chromebook account under one signed-in account. You can add multiple accounts separately to the same Chromebook.
You can add multiple accounts with the same names, the same birthdates, and the same Driver License. I've validated at least two YouTube channels by showing exactly the same ID.
Google did not terminate your account for the reason you state. You are not telling us all the background information.
Google may indeed terminate multiple accounts for the same person because of TOS violations. They will definitely link and associate your accounts, so making an "alt account" for misbehavior is not safe. If my "alt account" is compromised or violates TOS, then I can expect they will discipline all 6 equally, because they're all linked.
But operating multiple accounts is very explicitly supported by Google, and by Microsoft as well, I will say. I don't know about Apple. Facebook definitely prohibited this in the past, although you can maintain multiple "profiles" and "pages" that have unique settings and personalities.
This happening seemed kinda sketchy to me (because I've heard of people having several Google accounts) but, like I said, I didn't really care too much.
Anyway, here's how it went down:
In 2016 I was working w/ a Customer who was using some Google product (I believe Workspace) and I have to have a Google account to interact w/ it. Because I didn't care for them to see my "personal" Google account I make this one-off account.
This account is a Google account w/o Gmail (i.e. the username is not "@gmail.com"). That may be a factor.
Over the years I'd receive notifications that Google was going to delete the account for inactivity. I'd logon again to keep it active.
On 2026-01-12 I got a notification that my old "role" Google account was going to be deleted for being inactive for two years. I decided I wanted to keep it so I attempted to logon. The password in my vault didn't work. I found that perplexing, so I did a "Forgot password" workflow. As part of that I was offered an SMS option. I used the telephone number I use for my main Google account. For sure they "know" I'm the same operator of both accounts.
I don't believe somebody guessed the password on this account and was using it because (a) I was notified it was inactive, and (b) the password was a random 16 character alphanumeric string used only for this account. Something was clearly sketchy about the password being "wrong", though.
I completed the "Forgot password" workflow on the "role" account and got access. I decided to enable TOTP and my "real" Gmail account as the recovery contact. Everything seemed fine.
On 2026-01-13 I received a message as-follows:
> From: Google <no-reply@accounts.google.com>
> To: MyUsername@NotGmail.example.com
> Subject: Your Google Account has been disabled
> It looks like this account was created or used with multiple other accounts to violate Google's policies. The account might have been created by a computer program or bot.
> If you think your account was disabled by mistake, submit an appeal as soon as possible.
> Disabled accounts are eventually deleted. You’ll need to submit an appeal soon to keep your emails, contacts, photos, and other data saved in your Google Account.
> If you live in the European Union (EU) or are an EU citizen, there may be additional resolution options available to you.
For spam which only does not require manual effort on the other side, there is no reason to filter out potential victims and all the more reason to make it look as legit as possible to maximize conversion rates.
Unless there's a trade-off. Saying "respond now or your account will be erased!" doesn't sound very legit. But the number of additional victims the phisher gets by doing probably outweighs the number of more sophisticated victims he loses.
Of course, with a well-known email address, you could run a higher risk of credential stuffing, and an account takeover by someone who hijacks your email account, and then pivots from there to taking other accounts.
But this seems to be a risk we all take: email addresses are meant to be shared, to be public, and to be well-known to anyone to correspond with us.
I will say that disclosing my email address to certain parties has had noticeable effects. For example, I used "MYADDRESS+Echovita@gmail.com" once, and only once. My godfather had passed away, and I ordered some flowers for his funeral. And I put that order through with that email address.
Well, Echovita themselves had a data breach shortly afterwards, and I was inundated with scam emails. Just all sorts of attackers and they were basically all using the same M.O. But they were readily identifiable because I had used that "+Echovita" to identify it uniquely. And they really haven't stopped coming in. It's been 5 years since that breach.
So yes, especially with untrusted parties, it may help to tag your email address. I don't worry about receiving spam anywhere. But like I said, since I've never ever disclosed the addresses of 2-3 of my "alt accounts" they simply never receive any mail at all, spam or no spam.
so wildcard mail acceptance on servicename@customdomain.com takes the crown if you’re setting this up fresh!
(from other threads that we merged hither)
Or maybe someone really is reaching out to urgently tell me all about "legal boner tea."
Good job Google!
Vibe coding catching up on us all?
I figured it was some sort of glitch.
And a load of fake DMARC setup confirmation emails for a domain I own.
The reason given is that "Gmail hasn't scanned this message", so I suppose the scanners are unavailable/disabled for the time being.
They should also be tagged as "Important" but they are not. I believe this is a heuristic-based designation, and it has not been working too great lately. My most important mail is coming through as "unimportant".
You could click "Seems Safe" on these messages, but they are not scanned by Google, and they are simply adding a disclaimer that they currently can't vouch for the safety of a message that they couldn't scan. It seems to me that this is a prudent and helpful course of action.
Ive since gone on an unsubscribe campaign, and things seem bearable now.
This never happened. It was a lie spread on Twitter. And now you are spreading it.
They’re the very obvious, very obnoxious kind of spam, and Gmail still correctly sends them to the junk bin, so I wonder if they were shadowbanned before and Google simply decided to make the process more explicit (which I don’t hate on principle).
Either that or my address was scrapped from somewhere by a spam bot and the timing is coincidental.
As with search, I don't get why people still use google.
FWIW, I am not seeing this. My Spam label contains just spam.
Finally, it would be good to know what you are observing. Are you seeing this as recipient or sender?
- Emails are being aggressively marked as “suspicious” out of the blue (USPS, HR emails, system emails, promotional emails)
- Those emails are being regularly delayed by 7-10 minutes.
- Priority inbox rules seem reset
- “Never mark as spam” rules are seemingly not respected
Additional reports on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/GMail/comments/1qln9zp/gmail_not_fi...
Added: https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/incidents/NNnDkY...
has never worked consistently. For literally 10+ years now, I've always had a few emails per day go into spam even though that rule is in place.
It's good to be you! My wife and I both have 3-letter first names so we never had that option, despite getting in on the Gmail beta 20+ years ago.
Its really slow. Too slow to use 2FA or in some cases, verify email addresses or recover passwords.
Most people can't handle a notification on their watch every minute, or several spam every five minutes, so "large numbers of people" are shutting off notifications on their phones. And human nature being what it is, they're not going to be turned back on again. So the era of getting a notification when you get an email is coming to a close. "Important Immediate Attention Stuff" moved to text messages a long time ago anyway, at least for me. The list of technologies you can no longer reach me on, always increases over time...
I had to make a bunch of filters on my side.
One more reason to migrate to Proton
It might be a new round of AI training featuring the labour of customers as free employees doing training. Every time we click, we consent to sharing private email data.
With that much data, even a simple Bayesian classifier should work pretty much perfectly.
They even mark their own Arts & Culture email as spam: https://x.com/MBanerjeePalmer/status/1962538753328664693
The only upside of having an actual mail server is the ability to say "this is incorrect, no one ever tried to send an email to this address/from this IP" or custom 55x messages.
wow, you really do that? Doesn't that just prove that the email address is read by a human and then promoted for even further SPAM to be delivered?
I don’t care about whatever new shows Netflix has. Unsubscribe.
I don’t care about my DNS registrar having a sale. Unsubscribe.
You've functionally given yourself very little extra privacy because the vast majority of emails you send or receive will still cross through BigCorp servers (whether Google, Microsoft, Intuit, or other).
You can do the work to run your own mail server, but so few other people do that one end of the conversation is still almost always feeding a corporation's data lake.
No single BigCorp employee can go through all my mail.
If you're not convinced, no problem, please continue to enjoy your BigCorp email service.