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I recently applied to be a volunteer first aider for St John's Ambulance, who are fairly prominent in the UK. It was 2 weeks of no response to my application,

I recently applied to be a volunteer first aider for St John's Ambulance, who are fairly prominent in the UK. It was 2 weeks of no response to my application, until I happened to check my gmail spam folder to discover that SJA had invited me to a selection evening like the day after I'd applied! Marked as "not spam". Further correspondence from them, via the same address, ends up in spam list. Filter seems to be ignoring me reporting the misclassifications. I can't tell whether the spam filter is personalized per user, or whether my reports are drops in the ocean. Either way, I get that feeling that I don't own my own email account either.

9dev 8y ago
A while back, I realized I've missed lots and lots of important mails during about four months - Gmail had suddenly started flagging completely legit mail as spam, even from people I've had contact with previously. I tried flagging those mails appropriately, moved them to the inbox, but that didn't help either. Finally, I wrote a complaint feedback message, and a few days later, my spam filter was back to normal. I assume they put a small fraction of their users in A/B tests for the spam filter and can remove you manually on request. If that is true, it's completely unacceptable. I should probably migrate soon.
- breakingcups 8y ago
  I think it's optimistic to think that they would have removed you manually. The test probably just ended or the bug was corrected.
mstade 8y ago
FWIW I moved to FastMail from Gmail about three years ago and one of my main worries then was that I’d be inundated with spam when I didn’t have google’s filter to keep things clean. Since then I think I’ve only had one spam message come through to my inbox, and one or two that were incorrectly classified as spam. My worries were unfounded, as it turns out. (No affiliation with fastmail, just a customer.)
user5994461 8y ago
Author here. Shockingly, the company is to blame as much as gmail in most cases. There are a few settings to configure to be able to receive and send emails and many companies can't bother to do it. This can be as stupid as not setting the MX records or sending email from yorcompany.com (admire the subtle typo). Spam folder guaranteed. In this article for instance, the issue is incredibly stupid and only surpassed by the triviality of the workaround. It's been known for years, yet nothing is done about it.
- rightbyte 8y ago
  Why prevent users from whitelisting yorco.com? It's equally anoying that you can't blacklist what Google whitelists. You have to do folders or rules to delete mails from whitelisted senders.
  - joveian 8y ago
    I think because either yorco.com is a valid domain and fails SPF or it isn't a valid domain and allowing it lets anyone send mail from yorco.com. I don't understand why failing SPF doesn't reject the message in a way the sender can see.
    - user5994461 8y ago
      Having the wrong domain, the forwarding SMTP server will fail both the reverse MX check and SPF. That's straight to spam folder, if not transparent deletion. For gmail, you can register your domain in the google webmaster tools and it will show how many emails were filtered or not, by gmail users.
      - joveian 8y ago
        Why spam folder or delete rather than reject? IMO, such messages should always be rejected so that the sender can see that they aren't delivered. The usual explanation for spam folders or deletion is to prevent spammers from finding out what works, but this particular case that doesn't seem to apply since it is easy for spammers to check and not doing the basics should never work. Maybe in this case the point is to force you to use google webmaster tools...

9dev 8y ago

A while back, I realized I've missed lots and lots of important mails during about four months - Gmail had suddenly started flagging completely legit mail as spam, even from people I've had contact with previously. I tried flagging those mails appropriately, moved them to the inbox, but that didn't help either. Finally, I wrote a complaint feedback message, and a few days later, my spam filter was back to normal. I assume they put a small fraction of their users in A/B tests for the spam filter and can remove you manually on request. If that is true, it's completely unacceptable. I should probably migrate soon.

breakingcups 8y ago
I think it's optimistic to think that they would have removed you manually. The test probably just ended or the bug was corrected.

mstade 8y ago

FWIW I moved to FastMail from Gmail about three years ago and one of my main worries then was that I’d be inundated with spam when I didn’t have google’s filter to keep things clean. Since then I think I’ve only had one spam message come through to my inbox, and one or two that were incorrectly classified as spam. My worries were unfounded, as it turns out. (No affiliation with fastmail, just a customer.)

user5994461 8y ago

Author here. Shockingly, the company is to blame as much as gmail in most cases. There are a few settings to configure to be able to receive and send emails and many companies can't bother to do it. This can be as stupid as not setting the MX records or sending email from yorcompany.com (admire the subtle typo). Spam folder guaranteed. In this article for instance, the issue is incredibly stupid and only surpassed by the triviality of the workaround. It's been known for years, yet nothing is done about it.

rightbyte 8y ago
Why prevent users from whitelisting yorco.com? It's equally anoying that you can't blacklist what Google whitelists. You have to do folders or rules to delete mails from whitelisted senders.
- joveian 8y ago
  I think because either yorco.com is a valid domain and fails SPF or it isn't a valid domain and allowing it lets anyone send mail from yorco.com. I don't understand why failing SPF doesn't reject the message in a way the sender can see.
  - user5994461 8y ago
    Having the wrong domain, the forwarding SMTP server will fail both the reverse MX check and SPF. That's straight to spam folder, if not transparent deletion. For gmail, you can register your domain in the google webmaster tools and it will show how many emails were filtered or not, by gmail users.
    - joveian 8y ago
      Why spam folder or delete rather than reject? IMO, such messages should always be rejected so that the sender can see that they aren't delivered. The usual explanation for spam folders or deletion is to prevent spammers from finding out what works, but this particular case that doesn't seem to apply since it is easy for spammers to check and not doing the basics should never work. Maybe in this case the point is to force you to use google webmaster tools...