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I could see 20% false positives on spam for Linus equating to 0.1% of false positives across the board since I suspect the people emailing Linus are 200 times m
by dasil003 11y ago
I could see 20% false positives on spam for Linus equating to 0.1% of false positives across the board since I suspect the people emailing Linus are 200 times more likely to be running their own mail server than the general public.
- skrebbel 11y agoyeah, things would be way better if everybody just used gmail!
- EStudley 11y agoI agree completely. Wasn't there a thread here a just few days ago discussing Gmail consistently marking personal mail servers as spam? EDIT: Found it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9855030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9855030
- mordocai 11y agoI use DKIM and have Reverse DNS + SPF and gmail likes my email just fine. However, previous to setting all that up gmail would commonly mark my messages as spam. I haven't tested it in the last few days.
- cmdrfred 11y agoI have all of that and it took about 2 weeks of people pulling my messages out of spam for it to work smoothly.
- kbenson 11y agoWere they set up initially, or after you noticed problems? I wonder if prior messages routed to the spam folder that people haven't marked as non-spam count against you for a certain prior period.
- cmdrfred 11y agoI added them after I noticed problems really. Postfix and Dovecot have somewhat of a learning curve (I started up and trashed a few VM's before I got it right). I ended up using IRedMail, the defaults are pretty much Gmail ready. I don't know about prior messages counting against you, given what I've seen it seems to makes sense. Without insider info we can only speculate.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- kbenson 11y agoWhich is just as well, since even if you can set up a mail daemon, if you can't set up the rest of that, you have no place running a mail server.
- fweespeech 11y agoAnd the moment someone accidentally clicks the SPAM button you'll find yourself with weeks of pain on a low volume mail server. Because, as an individual, you won't qualify for their FBL service and "mysteriously" you'll have weeks of everyone saying you end up in their spam folder.
- kyrra 11y agoThe Gmail team recently launched[0] PostMaster tools[1]. I'm not sure if everyone has access, but maybe it would help? [0] http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-mail-you-want-not-spam-you-dont.html http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-mail-you-want-not-... [1] https://postmaster.google.com/ https://postmaster.google.com/
- nmjenkins 11y agoYou have to be a high volume sender with a good reputation (low spam reports) to get access to these tools.
- scintill76 11y agoAnd they don't tell you whether you meet those criteria, until after you go to the trouble of logging in and serving a DNS TXT record for ownership verification, as I just found. Granted, I didn't expect to qualify, but it would have been nice if they'd told me up front.
- blfr 11y agoYes, but at least they're using the same verification mechanism as elsewhere so if you have already added the domain to Google Webmaster for example under the same Google Account, it will be automatically verified.
- massaman_yams 11y agoThe reputation requirements here are a very low bar; as far as I can tell it's effectively "don't be a botnet".
- Lunatic666 11y agoI had exactly the same setup, but I had to create 10 fake Gmail accounts, add the email address to the address book and flag several emails as "not spam" before it was useable. Google Mail just ignores the fact that there are private people who want to have their own mail server to be independent from Gmail.
- ChuckMcM 11y agoYes, Google seems to have flipped some switch or pushed some change that takes well established domains and senders from that domain and for reasons that are not well understood written them off as spam. In theory they are getting a huge 'not spam' signal back at HQ but I agree with Linus that they screwed up big time. Stuff they should know wasn't spam and have in the past not classified as spam, now suddenly is. Algorithm update fail.
- Too 11y agoFor some sender's I don't even have the "report as spam" button, even though most of the shit I get from them is ads I didn't ask for. Just because it's from a well recognized company domain.
- jarcane 11y agoThis started hitting several of my mailing lists a while back. Not just personal servers, but several major web mail providers, most notably Yahoo and AOL. Some theories floated around that it had to do with a change to header/certificates, but I don't recall if I saw any actual confirmation of that.
- OJFord 11y agoPretty ironic, then, that many suggestions in comments (on the source) are "you should just run your own mail server". Maybe two 'wrongs' do make a right..
- davidgerard 11y agoThis hit us at work really badly: we use GApps, and everything from our internal list server (which we can't replace with GMail aliases because $REASONS) was being sent to spam ... and there was literally no way to whitelist this across the company automatically. You know how Google treats its free customers with utter contempt? I can assure you, they treat paying customers with the same contempt.
- michel-slm 11y agoEven if said personal servers have DKIM and SPF set up? (Just thinking out loud here, I don't have data either way)
- aidenn0 11y agoYup, I saw a lot of people complain about this, despite having DKIM and SPF
- fweespeech 11y agoYeah, its part of why I gave up on running my own mail server and signed up for Google Apps back when it was free. Its just not worth fighting the spam filters for side projects. It was probably something along the lines of "Well consumers are what matters and they all use major services".
- rodgerd 11y ago> I suspect the people emailing Linus are 200 times more likely to be running their own mail server than the general public. Assuming non-gmail servers are spammers is a pretty epic fail.
- peeters 11y agoWhat about using it as one of many criteria (maybe whether the email seems to contain gibberish being another, which patch files might be classified as).
- bigiain 11y agoOut of all the people in the world who regularly get mailed "gibberish" patchfiles, and not only fail to mark them as spam, but continue to interact regularly with the senders - do you not think it's reasonable to assume Gmail might notice Linus has been doing this for two or three decades? I wondr what other forms of "gibberish" Gmail classifys as spam? GPG encrypted mail? Mail containing public ssl keys or CSRs? ANy foreign language not regulalrly hard in Bro-ville, South Bay?
- dasil003 11y agoValue judgements aside, that's not what I'm postulating. It's more like "unknown" mail servers (meaning any mail server with low enough volume that Gmail doesn't have an opinion about it yet).
- thaumasiotes 11y agoSpeaking as someone who is at least 200 times more likely than the general gmail-using public to receive mail from completely normal, mainstream Chinese email addresses... I'm still mad at gmail for just assuming mail from China must be spam. It's not spam! (There's been improvement - for example, recently I received mail from someone I'd corresponded with in the past, and it wasn't initially marked as spam. Gmail used to be more aggressive than that, such that it would be marked as spam unless it was a direct reply to an email I had sent.) (...for extra irony, that recent message was "I'm stuck in England and can't get home without a few thousand dollars". Her account had been hacked.)
- thaumaturgy 11y agoThe hilarious -- or maybe really sickening -- thing is that Gmail itself has also become a much larger source of spam than it used to be. Those of us that are running mail servers are really not loving Google at the moment.
- urda 11y agoIt's what happens when you can control such a large portion of a resource. Just imagine, Google can at any moment blacklist just about anyone. Most websites and companies they can do nothing to stop it. It's a tad terrifying.
- justwannasing 11y agoHaven't a clue what you mean. I run several mail servers and have no issues whatsoever with GMail. And I run through all the spam filtering, too, and only recall one that was inadvertently marked as spam but, iirc, the mailer was the problem.
- thaumaturgy 11y agoI wrote a daemon that monitors a mailbox that users can submit spam to, for spam that makes it through the other filtering layers. The daemon finds the original message in the user's mail directory, reads the headers, tracks down the originating network using whois, and then blackholes the network and emails me a notification about it. Some networks are whitelisted for practical purposes. Google's one of them. If necessary, I could provide a list of the subject lines of the emails that have been reported. A YC company, Zenefits, is one offender that comes immediately to mind. But not until Monday. I'm going camping.
- raverbashing 11y agoWell, as he said, some emails on the middle of threads were marked as Spam Funny thing that happened to me, a mail from Google was marked as Spam. This was a long time ago, and it was from a mailing list, but apart from that, it was a legitimate mail.
- mike_hearn 11y agoThis happens because of DMARC. It does actually make sense, in a way. DMARC allows a domain to say "email that claims to come from my domain must be signed by me. If it doesn't, burn it with fire, no exceptions". So Gmail is only following the instructions laid out by the sending domain. This is helping to make the email ecosystem a lot more robust by ending the problem of From forging. Ordinary users rarely realise that the From header is otherwise meaningless so phishing them can be very easy. However it does not play well with mailman's default settings, and a lot of mailing list admins refuse to help the email ecosystem become more secure (whilst often PGP signing their own mails, doh). So DMARC creates a lot of noise in the technical community from people who have to/want to use mailman based lists.
- austenallred 11y agoI decided to do a quick check of my gmail; there were 151 emails in spam, and literally not one I would want in my inbox. It seems entirely likely that Google is weighting whether something comes from a private mail server very heavily, and Linus, being who he is, gets a lot of email from private servers. Not saying this isn't a problem, but it probably doesn't affect 99% of email users.
- wahnfrieden 11y agoJust FYI, most spam does not even reach your spam folder.
- nchelluri 11y agoWhat happens to it? It gets blackholed somehow?
- leonatan 11y agoMail relay servers deny its acceptance.
- wahnfrieden 11y agoGoogle can also decide it's not even worth showing in the spam folder - the spam folder is for things it's less certain of.
- themartorana 11y agoTrue. We send thousands of emails a week and all of a sudden a large portion weren't even delivered. Turns out it's all DMARC and once those policies were fixed (assigned at all) the delivery denials ended. This helped us: https://dmarc.postmarkapp.com https://dmarc.postmarkapp.com
- pbreit 11y ago"I would want in my inbox" Unfortunately that's not the definition of spam.
- knodi123 11y agoHis point about marking one email in the middle of a thread is inexcusable. I've seen that happen too. And only recently.
- nnbvv 11y agoI've seen it happen too (from my parents no less, who I have replied to 100s of times), but not recently. Yahoo's spam filter also does this.
- choppaface 11y agoTrue, but the spam filter could certainly learn to weight private mail servers as Ham on a per-user basis. Perhaps the learning algorithm can't generalize the feature to new unseen private make servers. However, Google certainly has the engineers who can add that functionality, they just need to properly manage them to get it done.
- TylerE 11y agoFWIW, I just checked my mail from the last week, and had 4 false positives, out of ~80 mails. That's WAY higher than I've traditionally had with Gmail, where I might expect that many in a year.
- serve_yay 11y agoI don't understand why you think that makes this acceptable.
- dasil003 11y agoI don't understand why you think I think that makes this acceptable.
- saurik 11y agoThe way you worded the sentence is classically used to indicate "well, this is an anomoly, because he is not a normal user, and is maybe even doing something absolutely abnormal, making this a trade off between the needs of the many vs the needs of the few, one he can easily bypass by doing something different inside his niche"; it took me reading a few of your later replies before I felt you were just providing an explanation for how Google's math could be flawed, as opposed to providing an explanation for why this might be an acceptable casualty.
- dpweb 11y agoI don't know about the spam filters but Torvalds' rants when he's onto something are awesome.
- halviti 11y agoOn top of that, how many of those thousands of threads are unique individuals. I would venture a guess that many or most of them are coming from similar people, or at very least similar domains, or even the same mail server.
- massaman_yams 11y agoYou're probably right. Mailing lists (of the discussion group variety, not marketing mail) often have problems with spam filter false positives, most commonly due to DMARC policies. There's not really a great solution to that at the moment - either you technically violate RFCs by having your your discussion group software modify some headers, or you deal with other kinds of breakage. Doing header rewrites is effective for reducing FPs due to DMARC, but adoption is far from universal - off the top of my head I'm not even sure if Mailman supports that at the moment.
- mike_hearn 11y agoYou only have to rewrite headers if your mailing list is actually modifying the mails i.e. doing a MITM attack on the mail flow. Some mailing list admins feel very strongly about footers, subject line tags etc and then claim they "must" rewrite the From header, but I am not sure it's technically required.
- massaman_yams 11y agoDiscussion groups retransmit messages, which is enough to fail authentication in a lot of cases. Here's an example: you have an address @google.com, which has a DMARC policy of 'quarantine'. You send a message from this address to a discussion group, which in the process, resends your message from a non-google server, thus failing DMARC. Google's DMARC policy says that if an ISP receives a message from a @google.com From address and the message fails DMARC, that ISP should place the message in the spam folder. So it boils down to: does a list operator change the From address in distribution group mail to use a list address they own in order to pass DMARC, or do you deal with the filtering consequences of failing DMARC for many domains?
- mike_hearn 11y agoThe whole point of DKIM is that messages can be relayed without breaking authentication, because it uses digital signatures instead of sending IP. So I think it wouldn't break
- caf 11y agoThe funny thing is that according to the comments, some mail from Google itself is being marked as spam.
- georgemcbay 11y agoLast year google paid me $1500 for finding a security flaw in Chrome. The mail they sent me with the ACH information was marked as spam/phishing: http://i.imgur.com/Icfeh60.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Icfeh60.jpg
- snogglethorpe 11y agoYeah, whatever the problem here is, it's almost certainly very user-specific, depending on the mix of email they get, and Linus is probably somewhat atypical. I saw his original post on G+, and of course immediately went and checked my gmail spam folder.... and... no false positives at all, 100% correctly identified spam.
- alexott 11y agoI got problems this week with mailing lists routed through apache servers & for which I had filters created, etc. And this happens not only for mailing lists
- viraptor 11y agoHe said it mostly affected mailing list messages. His subscriptions come from a single server, so random spam classification of messages in the middle of some thread doesn't really make sense. Not as a sending-server issue anyway.