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Meanwhile, Gmail is obsessed with tagging messages I get from nearly every mailing list I'm on, including ones hosted by google groups, as spam. Even messages s

Meanwhile, Gmail is obsessed with tagging messages I get from nearly every mailing list I'm on, including ones hosted by google groups, as spam. Even messages sent by a gmail user, to a google group. Outdoor groups? Spam. Technical mailing lists? Spam. Social group mailing lists? Spam. I have filters assigning these messages to labels. I have been on some of these lists for ten fucking years. I routinely go into my spam folder and find a dozen messages from these lists tagged as spam, dutifully click "not spam", and rinse/wash/repeat. Rarely does spam make it into my inbox, but it's so much worse that messages I give a shit about are routinely dumped into my spam box. But not so routinely that I think to check it often enough...

gjs278 4y ago
2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
That's the consequence of machine learning and allowing people to mark stuff as spam. 80% of all spam reports I get are for legitimate mails. A surprisingly large amount of them are people who mark their own mails as spam.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  I don't think this is why. In my experience, when this happens, it's universally because the message failed at least one of SPF, DKIM, or DMARC.
  - theK 4y ago
    While these factors can cause a quarantine or even silent disposal, empirical evidence suggests that there are custom mechanisms (ie spam filters) downstream that do the larger part of the filtering. I have been running private Mail servers since the early 2000s and this last decade has certainly not been nice to folks that want to self host. I cannot even send my mother in law email because Google just plainly denies delivery with no way to circumvent. Funnily enough mass mailing from the same account 10000 other gmail addresses has delivery metrics just like doing it with mailchimp. I think it is safe to say that big email hosting has grown so complex internally that the companies themselves can’t really make sense of it any more. Edit: to preempt possible “you are doing it wrong” comments, my Mail server setup checks out in every conceivable test suite and email content as well :-)
    - 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
      It's not just you, and it's not just people who are self-hosting. The agressive spam filtering at Gmail/Hotmail is an industry-wide issue and while most of us get by, there's no denying that there's a lot of false positives. The Mailop mailing list has a nice note about it on their Best Practices page: > If you want to send mail to recipients who have accounts at big email providers, be aware that all of the above cannot guarantee that these providers won’t reject your mail, put it straight into recipient’s spam folder or just silently discard it - they just impose their own rules on anyone and you virtually can’t do anything about it.
  - 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
    Failed SPF/DKIM/DMARC doesn't trigger abuse reports through feedback loops. Marking messages as spam does. These are cases where one party has decided to mark one or more emails as spam. None of the emails in question are bulk messages -- it's all sent from properly authenticated domains and most of the mails are from ongoing conversations. A lot of it's correspondence between private individuals, others between businesses. Giving people a Junk button is a bad idea at scale. There's been a lot of discussion about this being a linguistical issue (that people don't realise Trash and Junk are different things), but I regularly see people marking entire conversations as Junk when they're angry about not getting an invoice's due date moved, or when arguing with a family member. The worst part is that people don't realise the Junk button often triggers a report to the sender's ESP. The contents of the reported emails are usually included, and in most cases the reports are read by someone else. All this is also processed by spam filters, regardless if it's simple SpamAssassin/Bayes setups, or more advanced systems at Hotmail/Gmail.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
unsafecast 4y ago
I have the _exact_ same problem, and I've never had it with any other mail provider. They say Gmail is 'the most advanced'. I may be wrong but I don't remember them being as bad going back, so I guess their advancements aren't working. I mean, Paul Graham seems to be doing fine with a simple[1] algorithm. If I remember correctly, most mail providers used to do the same thing as he described. "Good security means constantly staying ahead of threats, and our existing ML models are highly effective at doing this—in conjunction with our other protections, they help block more than 99.9 percent of spam, phishing, and malware from reaching Gmail inboxes" [2] That may be true, if you don't consider false positives. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/antispam.html http://www.paulgraham.com/antispam.html [2] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/ridding-gmail-of-100-million-more-spam-messages-with-tensorflow https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/ridding-gmail...
superasn 4y ago
This is so true. This false spam tagging has caused me so much pain with paying customers, I ended up white listing all email to a particular to address using a filter. It's unbelievable that email is so fragile and broken.

gjs278 4y ago

2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago

That's the consequence of machine learning and allowing people to mark stuff as spam. 80% of all spam reports I get are for legitimate mails. A surprisingly large amount of them are people who mark their own mails as spam.

josephcsible 4y ago
I don't think this is why. In my experience, when this happens, it's universally because the message failed at least one of SPF, DKIM, or DMARC.
- theK 4y ago
  While these factors can cause a quarantine or even silent disposal, empirical evidence suggests that there are custom mechanisms (ie spam filters) downstream that do the larger part of the filtering. I have been running private Mail servers since the early 2000s and this last decade has certainly not been nice to folks that want to self host. I cannot even send my mother in law email because Google just plainly denies delivery with no way to circumvent. Funnily enough mass mailing from the same account 10000 other gmail addresses has delivery metrics just like doing it with mailchimp. I think it is safe to say that big email hosting has grown so complex internally that the companies themselves can’t really make sense of it any more. Edit: to preempt possible “you are doing it wrong” comments, my Mail server setup checks out in every conceivable test suite and email content as well :-)
  - 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
    It's not just you, and it's not just people who are self-hosting. The agressive spam filtering at Gmail/Hotmail is an industry-wide issue and while most of us get by, there's no denying that there's a lot of false positives. The Mailop mailing list has a nice note about it on their Best Practices page: > If you want to send mail to recipients who have accounts at big email providers, be aware that all of the above cannot guarantee that these providers won’t reject your mail, put it straight into recipient’s spam folder or just silently discard it - they just impose their own rules on anyone and you virtually can’t do anything about it.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
  Failed SPF/DKIM/DMARC doesn't trigger abuse reports through feedback loops. Marking messages as spam does. These are cases where one party has decided to mark one or more emails as spam. None of the emails in question are bulk messages -- it's all sent from properly authenticated domains and most of the mails are from ongoing conversations. A lot of it's correspondence between private individuals, others between businesses. Giving people a Junk button is a bad idea at scale. There's been a lot of discussion about this being a linguistical issue (that people don't realise Trash and Junk are different things), but I regularly see people marking entire conversations as Junk when they're angry about not getting an invoice's due date moved, or when arguing with a family member. The worst part is that people don't realise the Junk button often triggers a report to the sender's ESP. The contents of the reported emails are usually included, and in most cases the reports are read by someone else. All this is also processed by spam filters, regardless if it's simple SpamAssassin/Bayes setups, or more advanced systems at Hotmail/Gmail.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

unsafecast 4y ago

I have the _exact_ same problem, and I've never had it with any other mail provider. They say Gmail is 'the most advanced'. I may be wrong but I don't remember them being as bad going back, so I guess their advancements aren't working. I mean, Paul Graham seems to be doing fine with a simple[1] algorithm. If I remember correctly, most mail providers used to do the same thing as he described. "Good security means constantly staying ahead of threats, and our existing ML models are highly effective at doing this—in conjunction with our other protections, they help block more than 99.9 percent of spam, phishing, and malware from reaching Gmail inboxes" [2] That may be true, if you don't consider false positives. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/antispam.html http://www.paulgraham.com/antispam.html [2] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/ridding-gmail-of-100-million-more-spam-messages-with-tensorflow https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/ridding-gmail...

superasn 4y ago

This is so true. This false spam tagging has caused me so much pain with paying customers, I ended up white listing all email to a particular to address using a filter. It's unbelievable that email is so fragile and broken.