7 ms·

For some reason, gmail classifies nearly all of the transactional email I get from Amazon (order acknowledgements, shipping notifications, etc) as spam, and no

For some reason, gmail classifies nearly all of the transactional email I get from Amazon (order acknowledgements, shipping notifications, etc) as spam, and no matter how many I catch and un-mark, it won't stop. Spam classification is a hard problem, but I don't think they've put the false-positive/false-negative tradeoff in the right place, and they really need some safety valves like offering to whitelist an address when you un-mark it as spam.

kllrnohj 12y ago
Amazon mail works fine for me. But there is a white list, if you add the sender to your contact list it is white listed.
- larrys 12y ago
  That doesn't help occasional important people who might send you an email that you might miss because it ends up in spam.
ibz 12y ago
I always mark Amazon mail as spam. Could it be that if a lot of people mark a certain kind of email as spam, Google just treats it as spam?
- taeric 12y ago
  Why not just opt out of the emails? Each one should have a link on it, so that you don't even have to find the page in the site, if I'm not mistaken.
- rev_bird 12y ago
  If so, it seems like an uncharacteristically clunky way of doing it -- sure, clickthrough rate has a some effect on PageRank, for example, but there's a ton of content-based filtering going on too. I don't really want my spam folder full of false-positives because folks don't want to unsubscribe from things.
- ccozan 12y ago
  I would not recommend this. Amazon emails can be unsubscribed. And they are not really spam, they are not coming unsolicited, aren't they?
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    I get a ton of unsolicited email from Amazon. It tends to be of the form "order confirmation for product XXXXX" or "your order of XXXXX has shipped". I don't view this as particularly unreasonable, though.
    - nitrogen 12y ago
      Emails in response to you direct action (placing an order) are the very definition of solicited email.
      - thaumasiotes 12y ago
        No, emails that you ask to receive are the definition of solicited email. When was the last time the grocery store emailed you confirming that you'd just paid for your groceries?
        johnduhart 12y ago
        > When was the last time the grocery store emailed you confirming that you'd just paid for your groceries? Never because my grocery store isn't a website.
        thaumasiotes 12y ago
        OK. When was the last time facebook emailed you to confirm that you liked a comment?
        cptn_brittish 12y ago
        The last time I had Facebook emails before I marked Facebook as spam every action which somehow concerned me on Facebook resulted in me getting a email and consequently flooding my inbox. Admittantly this was a few years ago when I finaly had enough of it so they might of gotten better but at one point they did.
- npsimons 12y ago
  Why are you doing this? If you subscribed to something, do the responsible thing and unsubscribe from it. Don't fuck up spam filtering just to be lazy.
- guelo 12y ago
  It's probably people like you that misuse the spam button that caused Google to give more weight to other signals for tuning their spam classifier.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  To all the people that say "don't do this" - I don't do this with Amazon, but I do that with LinkedIn and any company that starts to, well, spam me with e-mails. And I think it's totally fair. It's a way for people to send a message to the companies that don't respect their customers time, because some bean counter realized that they can wast X hours of people's time and get Y amount of additional sales from it. I'm sure that without such feedback, we'd get spammed by useless newsletters even more. (And keep this discussion in mind next time you read a HN story teaching people how cool e-mail marketing is for your startup - what it's cool at is often pissing off your users.) Also Google took a good approach to that issue - when an e-mail has an unsubscribe link and you try to mark it as spam, you get asked if you'd like to unsubscribe instead. And yes, I sometimes do exactly that.
  - npsimons 12y ago
    This is a difficult balancing act, to be sure. I firmly believe two things would help: 1) Unsubscribe should be one click, no confirmation. In the case of accidentally unsubscribing, if it's really that valuable, the person will re-subscribe, and I guarantee it's easy to subscribe because that's already optimized, for obvious reasons. 2) GMail shouldn't give you the option to choose; if you mark something as spam, it should silently attempt to unsubscribe in the background, then keep track of which services don't actually support unsubscribe, and mark those as spam. Far too many people are vindictive and lazy and will intentionally mark things as spam either because they don't want to go through the process of unsubscribing, or they forgot they subscribed, or think they've been "wronged" by getting an email they opted in to. For the record, I too despise the oblivious email marketing stories on HN, eg the "cold emailing" C level execs whose addresses aren't publicly available. Dirty, dirty, dirty.
throwawayaway 12y ago
well i've started marking ebay, linkedin and google+ stuff as spam. i'm sure somebody else did amazon the same favour... so... sorry? :)
- npsimons 12y ago
  Don't do this. Seriously, don't. It's one thing if you never asked to get additional emails or you can't opt out, but if you signed up for it, at least put in the same amount of effort to get out of it first. If that fails, sure, then start marking as spam. Otherwise, you're feeding false positives into the system, thereby degrading it on purpose.
  - marcosdumay 12y ago
    Most Amazon email is spam. They send tons of promotional email to everybody that buys something there, with not even an opt-out option, and after you receive the emails, go to the opt-out link and uncheck it, they create new categories with you signed in by default. The GP is correct in marking amazon emails as spam, and I'll ask anybody that's considering stopping to keep marking it. That said, this is no excuse for Google to mark their transactional emails as spam for people that clearly want to receive them. Google is just being lazy and doing a bad job. Even Yahoo gets that right, Google can do it too.
    - thaumasiotes 12y ago
      Speaking as a person who frequently buys from Amazon, I've never experienced this. (No, it's not that promotional email from Amazon is going into my spam folder. I have to check my spam folder semi-regularly because gmail keeps flagging perfectly legitimate email as spam.) The mail I get from Amazon is order confirmations and a newsletter that I specifically signed up for. What's this promotional email that you're talking about?
      - throwawayaway 12y ago
        http://imgur.com/yqsYyPY http://imgur.com/yqsYyPY of the 64 emails I have from them 50 are spam of this nature.
shiggerino 12y ago
It would also be nice if you could disable spam filtering entirely and run your own client-side.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Looking at the contents of my spam folder, and knowing that they likely reject many more e-mails in the background, I'm pretty sure I'd drown if I ever tried to use such option...
- clogston 12y ago
  > It would also be nice if you could disable spam filtering entirely and run your own client-side. It's horribly convoluted but it /is/ possible to do so: http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/69442/how-to-disable-gmail-anti-spam-completely http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/69442/how-to-disa... I've been running it this way for about 18 months now after having a few important emails get gobbled up by their spam filter.
  - shiggerino 12y ago
    It's as if they intentionally want to force their filter on you. Not that there's anything wrong with a server-side spam filter. One that puts a polite X-Spam-Score header so you can adjust the sensitivity client-side.
pyrocat 12y ago
add a filter. From: *@amazon.com -> never mark as spam.
michaelt 12y ago
Is your amazon account on a personal domain e-mail address, forwarding to your gmail? Apparently forwarding can sometimes invalidate the SPF or DKIM [1] depending on the settings involved. [1] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/175365?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/175365?hl=en

kllrnohj 12y ago

Amazon mail works fine for me. But there is a white list, if you add the sender to your contact list it is white listed.

larrys 12y ago
That doesn't help occasional important people who might send you an email that you might miss because it ends up in spam.

ibz 12y ago

I always mark Amazon mail as spam. Could it be that if a lot of people mark a certain kind of email as spam, Google just treats it as spam?

taeric 12y ago
Why not just opt out of the emails? Each one should have a link on it, so that you don't even have to find the page in the site, if I'm not mistaken.
rev_bird 12y ago
If so, it seems like an uncharacteristically clunky way of doing it -- sure, clickthrough rate has a some effect on PageRank, for example, but there's a ton of content-based filtering going on too. I don't really want my spam folder full of false-positives because folks don't want to unsubscribe from things.
ccozan 12y ago
I would not recommend this. Amazon emails can be unsubscribed. And they are not really spam, they are not coming unsolicited, aren't they?
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  I get a ton of unsolicited email from Amazon. It tends to be of the form "order confirmation for product XXXXX" or "your order of XXXXX has shipped". I don't view this as particularly unreasonable, though.
  - nitrogen 12y ago
    Emails in response to you direct action (placing an order) are the very definition of solicited email.
    - thaumasiotes 12y ago
      No, emails that you ask to receive are the definition of solicited email. When was the last time the grocery store emailed you confirming that you'd just paid for your groceries?
      - johnduhart 12y ago
        > When was the last time the grocery store emailed you confirming that you'd just paid for your groceries? Never because my grocery store isn't a website.
        thaumasiotes 12y ago
        OK. When was the last time facebook emailed you to confirm that you liked a comment?
        cptn_brittish 12y ago
        The last time I had Facebook emails before I marked Facebook as spam every action which somehow concerned me on Facebook resulted in me getting a email and consequently flooding my inbox. Admittantly this was a few years ago when I finaly had enough of it so they might of gotten better but at one point they did.
npsimons 12y ago
Why are you doing this? If you subscribed to something, do the responsible thing and unsubscribe from it. Don't fuck up spam filtering just to be lazy.
guelo 12y ago
It's probably people like you that misuse the spam button that caused Google to give more weight to other signals for tuning their spam classifier.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
To all the people that say "don't do this" - I don't do this with Amazon, but I do that with LinkedIn and any company that starts to, well, spam me with e-mails. And I think it's totally fair. It's a way for people to send a message to the companies that don't respect their customers time, because some bean counter realized that they can wast X hours of people's time and get Y amount of additional sales from it. I'm sure that without such feedback, we'd get spammed by useless newsletters even more. (And keep this discussion in mind next time you read a HN story teaching people how cool e-mail marketing is for your startup - what it's cool at is often pissing off your users.) Also Google took a good approach to that issue - when an e-mail has an unsubscribe link and you try to mark it as spam, you get asked if you'd like to unsubscribe instead. And yes, I sometimes do exactly that.
- npsimons 12y ago
  This is a difficult balancing act, to be sure. I firmly believe two things would help: 1) Unsubscribe should be one click, no confirmation. In the case of accidentally unsubscribing, if it's really that valuable, the person will re-subscribe, and I guarantee it's easy to subscribe because that's already optimized, for obvious reasons. 2) GMail shouldn't give you the option to choose; if you mark something as spam, it should silently attempt to unsubscribe in the background, then keep track of which services don't actually support unsubscribe, and mark those as spam. Far too many people are vindictive and lazy and will intentionally mark things as spam either because they don't want to go through the process of unsubscribing, or they forgot they subscribed, or think they've been "wronged" by getting an email they opted in to. For the record, I too despise the oblivious email marketing stories on HN, eg the "cold emailing" C level execs whose addresses aren't publicly available. Dirty, dirty, dirty.

throwawayaway 12y ago

well i've started marking ebay, linkedin and google+ stuff as spam. i'm sure somebody else did amazon the same favour... so... sorry? :)

npsimons 12y ago
Don't do this. Seriously, don't. It's one thing if you never asked to get additional emails or you can't opt out, but if you signed up for it, at least put in the same amount of effort to get out of it first. If that fails, sure, then start marking as spam. Otherwise, you're feeding false positives into the system, thereby degrading it on purpose.
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  Most Amazon email is spam. They send tons of promotional email to everybody that buys something there, with not even an opt-out option, and after you receive the emails, go to the opt-out link and uncheck it, they create new categories with you signed in by default. The GP is correct in marking amazon emails as spam, and I'll ask anybody that's considering stopping to keep marking it. That said, this is no excuse for Google to mark their transactional emails as spam for people that clearly want to receive them. Google is just being lazy and doing a bad job. Even Yahoo gets that right, Google can do it too.
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    Speaking as a person who frequently buys from Amazon, I've never experienced this. (No, it's not that promotional email from Amazon is going into my spam folder. I have to check my spam folder semi-regularly because gmail keeps flagging perfectly legitimate email as spam.) The mail I get from Amazon is order confirmations and a newsletter that I specifically signed up for. What's this promotional email that you're talking about?
    - throwawayaway 12y ago
      http://imgur.com/yqsYyPY http://imgur.com/yqsYyPY of the 64 emails I have from them 50 are spam of this nature.

shiggerino 12y ago

It would also be nice if you could disable spam filtering entirely and run your own client-side.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
Looking at the contents of my spam folder, and knowing that they likely reject many more e-mails in the background, I'm pretty sure I'd drown if I ever tried to use such option...
clogston 12y ago
> It would also be nice if you could disable spam filtering entirely and run your own client-side. It's horribly convoluted but it /is/ possible to do so: http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/69442/how-to-disable-gmail-anti-spam-completely http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/69442/how-to-disa... I've been running it this way for about 18 months now after having a few important emails get gobbled up by their spam filter.
- shiggerino 12y ago
  It's as if they intentionally want to force their filter on you. Not that there's anything wrong with a server-side spam filter. One that puts a polite X-Spam-Score header so you can adjust the sensitivity client-side.

pyrocat 12y ago

add a filter. From: *@amazon.com -> never mark as spam.

michaelt 12y ago

Is your amazon account on a personal domain e-mail address, forwarding to your gmail? Apparently forwarding can sometimes invalidate the SPF or DKIM [1] depending on the settings involved. [1] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/175365?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/175365?hl=en