5 ms·

The worst is when they accept the mail but silently tag it spam and put it some place the intended receipient will never see it. Google's gmail is the worst abo

The worst is when they accept the mail but silently tag it spam and put it some place the intended receipient will never see it. Google's gmail is the worst about this. Corporate email isn't email anymore. It's a walled garden / silo like Facebook.

rrr_oh_man 3y ago
> Corporate email isn't email anymore. It's a walled garden Thank god. Otherwise I'd drown in cold email spam. edit: But on a serious note — I'm using Gmail for all companies because I gave up trying to run and administer our own server. It's a travesty that this has become so hard. I feel if you're not on a well-configured Gmail Workspace there's no chance your email gets through, even if legit.
plantain 3y ago
I'm certainly not saying it's right - but it works. Gmail's spam filter (and promotions filter) works with >99% reliability as a user, with really trivial numbers of false positives.
- ndriscoll 3y ago
  I haven't found this to be true at all. I've probably marked thousands of linkedin messages as spam, but they still land in my inbox occasionally. I also get random e-commerce related spam from sites I've never heard of. The false negative rate is massive on corporate spam that should be trivial to classify I'd think. e.g. some of them literally have some variation of "this is an advertisement" along with unsubscribe links.
  - arccy 3y ago
    > I've probably marked thousands of linkedin messages as spam, but they still land in my inbox occasionally. at this point maybe you should just create a filter rule
- nh2 3y ago
  Cannot confirm. We get a large number of false positives at our business GMail: Customer requests for quotes, Paypal/Stripe security messages, lots of other important emails go to spam. See e.g. https://github.com/nh2/gmail-spamfilters-paypal-security-messages https://github.com/nh2/gmail-spamfilters-paypal-security-mes... For a while now I suspect that GMail has some bug with its own group email addresses: When somebody sends an email to our GMail group email address team@example.com, it shows up in GMail as "Sombody via team@example.com". Of course, teamexample.com receives both spam and non-spam. I suspect that when we mark spam that comes "via team@example.com", GMail learns that as "things 'via team@example.com' are often Spam", even though info@example.com is a Google Groups email. And by now, everything that comes 'via team@example.com' is marked as Spam. So it seems that when we mark an email that arrived at team@example.com as Spam, Google punishes its own Group email address, instead of the sender.
  - hiatus 3y ago
    For that case you would have to mark the mail as spam in the groups interface, not via the forwarded mail.
    - nh2 3y ago
      While a possible explanation, that sounds extremely inconvenient, and a silly default. It's Google's own group of my own org. Does it make sense that the spam button would punish my group own email? Also, if I mark it spam in the Groups interface, it's still polluting the inboxes of all my team members where it has already arrived, right? I'd have to tell my team to never use the spam button on obviously spam emails. That doesn't make sense for a business email product!
  - ipsi 3y ago
    I think you can set it to be the other way around and have it be "never mark as spam when via team@example.com" - of course, depending on how much spam it gets that might be worse.
mjl- 3y ago
indeed very annoying. my understanding is they don't want to give spammers any signal whether their messages was recognized as ham or spam. i would love some insights in how smart spammers are in actually leveraging such information. most spam seems to be hammering attempts that don't take failure feedback into account. in my mail server, messages classified as junk keep getting temporarily rejected with a generic error message. at least the (legitimate misclassified) sender gets a delayed dsn, and finally feedback that a message wasn't received. it seems many mail servers/services think it's more important to not give a signal to spammers than it is to give a useful signal to legitimate but misclassified users. perhaps they think their classification is really great and doesn't misclassify...
jabroni_salad 3y ago
Unfortunately a lot of legal protections for unsolicited spam only apply to consumer usage. For b2b, every marketer with the ability to know your email address is entitled to send you as many messages as they want. If it wasnt walled, it would be completely unusable.
- inetknght 3y ago
  > If it wasnt walled, it would be completely unusable. It sounds like stiffer penalties are necessary for sending spam, both to consumers and to businesses.
  - jabroni_salad 3y ago
    I'm a big fan of proof of work for this usecase, personally.
    - inetknght 3y ago
      Exactly how will proof of work help this at all?
- superkuh 3y ago
  I run my own mailserver. I do a catch-all so I receive all email sent to my domain. Even with this setup it is not "completely unusable" in fact it is very very simple to manage spam (entirely in thunderbird, no mailserver side spam filtering) and I have no issues with it. I've had the domain for 20 years now so it is not like it is not out there for spammers to send to.
  - jabroni_salad 3y ago
    Sure. Now try it again as an IT manager at a company that buys expensive technology products, with an email address that has been slumming it in lead gen databases for years. Try it again as a loan officer whose job is to trade high-value PDFs with externals whose email address and title is on the bank's 'about us' page. The ability to know an address is the only license you need to send to it. The only reason you haven't had a bad time with this is because you haven't been a target.

rrr_oh_man 3y ago

> Corporate email isn't email anymore. It's a walled garden Thank god. Otherwise I'd drown in cold email spam. edit: But on a serious note — I'm using Gmail for all companies because I gave up trying to run and administer our own server. It's a travesty that this has become so hard. I feel if you're not on a well-configured Gmail Workspace there's no chance your email gets through, even if legit.

plantain 3y ago

I'm certainly not saying it's right - but it works. Gmail's spam filter (and promotions filter) works with >99% reliability as a user, with really trivial numbers of false positives.

ndriscoll 3y ago
I haven't found this to be true at all. I've probably marked thousands of linkedin messages as spam, but they still land in my inbox occasionally. I also get random e-commerce related spam from sites I've never heard of. The false negative rate is massive on corporate spam that should be trivial to classify I'd think. e.g. some of them literally have some variation of "this is an advertisement" along with unsubscribe links.
- arccy 3y ago
  > I've probably marked thousands of linkedin messages as spam, but they still land in my inbox occasionally. at this point maybe you should just create a filter rule
nh2 3y ago
Cannot confirm. We get a large number of false positives at our business GMail: Customer requests for quotes, Paypal/Stripe security messages, lots of other important emails go to spam. See e.g. https://github.com/nh2/gmail-spamfilters-paypal-security-messages https://github.com/nh2/gmail-spamfilters-paypal-security-mes... For a while now I suspect that GMail has some bug with its own group email addresses: When somebody sends an email to our GMail group email address team@example.com, it shows up in GMail as "Sombody via team@example.com". Of course, teamexample.com receives both spam and non-spam. I suspect that when we mark spam that comes "via team@example.com", GMail learns that as "things 'via team@example.com' are often Spam", even though info@example.com is a Google Groups email. And by now, everything that comes 'via team@example.com' is marked as Spam. So it seems that when we mark an email that arrived at team@example.com as Spam, Google punishes its own Group email address, instead of the sender.
- hiatus 3y ago
  For that case you would have to mark the mail as spam in the groups interface, not via the forwarded mail.
  - nh2 3y ago
    While a possible explanation, that sounds extremely inconvenient, and a silly default. It's Google's own group of my own org. Does it make sense that the spam button would punish my group own email? Also, if I mark it spam in the Groups interface, it's still polluting the inboxes of all my team members where it has already arrived, right? I'd have to tell my team to never use the spam button on obviously spam emails. That doesn't make sense for a business email product!
- ipsi 3y ago
  I think you can set it to be the other way around and have it be "never mark as spam when via team@example.com" - of course, depending on how much spam it gets that might be worse.

mjl- 3y ago

indeed very annoying. my understanding is they don't want to give spammers any signal whether their messages was recognized as ham or spam. i would love some insights in how smart spammers are in actually leveraging such information. most spam seems to be hammering attempts that don't take failure feedback into account. in my mail server, messages classified as junk keep getting temporarily rejected with a generic error message. at least the (legitimate misclassified) sender gets a delayed dsn, and finally feedback that a message wasn't received. it seems many mail servers/services think it's more important to not give a signal to spammers than it is to give a useful signal to legitimate but misclassified users. perhaps they think their classification is really great and doesn't misclassify...

jabroni_salad 3y ago

Unfortunately a lot of legal protections for unsolicited spam only apply to consumer usage. For b2b, every marketer with the ability to know your email address is entitled to send you as many messages as they want. If it wasnt walled, it would be completely unusable.

inetknght 3y ago
> If it wasnt walled, it would be completely unusable. It sounds like stiffer penalties are necessary for sending spam, both to consumers and to businesses.
- jabroni_salad 3y ago
  I'm a big fan of proof of work for this usecase, personally.
  - inetknght 3y ago
    Exactly how will proof of work help this at all?
superkuh 3y ago
I run my own mailserver. I do a catch-all so I receive all email sent to my domain. Even with this setup it is not "completely unusable" in fact it is very very simple to manage spam (entirely in thunderbird, no mailserver side spam filtering) and I have no issues with it. I've had the domain for 20 years now so it is not like it is not out there for spammers to send to.
- jabroni_salad 3y ago
  Sure. Now try it again as an IT manager at a company that buys expensive technology products, with an email address that has been slumming it in lead gen databases for years. Try it again as a loan officer whose job is to trade high-value PDFs with externals whose email address and title is on the bank's 'about us' page. The ability to know an address is the only license you need to send to it. The only reason you haven't had a bad time with this is because you haven't been a target.