That didn’t stop me from repeatedly getting junk from every other record label my email was sold to. It was an endless procession of shit I never subscribed to.
When either provider decides your small email server is sending spam (eg: sending an email with an attachment, or any kind of form email like a daily report) you won't get through to user inboxes, and instead you'll be routed to spam, or for Outlook.com hosted addresses they will accept mail from your server and send it to /dev/null. Gmail's process is bad, but Microsoft has decided to accept emails and throw them away (which is ridiculous).
I never had a problem with gmail for business regarding spam. I regularly receive mails from smaller businesses (some of them hosting their own mail server) and never had a complaint from anyone yet. Since i can also be contacted via phone i'd know.
On the other hand, MS Exchange constantly delivers obvious spam mails and (quite seldomly, but still) swallows legitimate mail.
Anectodal, i know. And disclaimer: the behavior depicted in the article is as bad as it gets, if everything is as described.
Yep. I missed an invitation to a Google-hosted event at a conference I attended because the email (from an @google.com address, no less) got caught in Gmail's spam filter.
(afaik in denver water boils at 95C)
50 of them blast twitter and it seems the world is collapsing.
The world is resilient.
That is assuming by error you mean missing the vein. If error is defined as a fatal complication, then 1/1000 is terrifying.
Google does what's best for Google - how could there be any discussion of that fact in 2019.
If there are 5 million people and 50,000 experience problems, that's fine?
Isaac Asimov's comments about world population increase involved something about this; the more people there are, the more each individual is dehumanised and rendered irrelevant (my paraphrasing).
When all rounded up it isn't even a single penny on the balance sheet. The owners of these businesses literally never even know from the their only view into the companies.
I have no idea why I'm being downvoted on this. Hackers can't do math or what?
On the other hand, once you train it a bit, it is mostly remarkable good. For me, switching from fastmail.fm (which was pretty good itself) to Gmail gave me a big improvement in spam control.
Shame on AT&T for not validating their customer's email address.
I too get the same type of spam from AT&T.
The only way Google would have to identify that this message was not for you would be to get the subscriber information from AT&T and cross-reference it with name and address information they had for you - and even then most of the time they'd probably be wrong (e.g. if the email is coming to you but the account is actually in a family member's name).
It doesn't make any sense since they are emails from Google, they are emails I even have a filter applied to so that a label is applied to them. Yes I can adjust the filter and choose "never send to spam" but the messages will still show a warning on them saying "This message was not sent to spam because of a filter you have applied".
Sure false positives makes sense, but I don't get how the majority of what is in my spam folder would be emails sent by Google.
It makes a lot of sense... people use the spam button as a lazy man's unsubscribe. Youtube adding the bell button, making mail opt in is probably a response to that.
I actually give Google a lot of cred for not simply white-listing its own domains. Though spammers would probably find ways to abuse it and make them look bad anyway.
This is the small mail server crux right here. If you’re a small mail server and a few of your emails have been spam binned instead of unsubscribed, it would likely lead to your whole server getting shit canned.
* Available for decades.
* Far from being top notch technology.
* Sometimes of course it's literally mean outdated. Like if you run older CentOS or Debian with decade-old packages.
So it's doesn't mean SpamAssassin is bad, but it's very far from state-of-the-art ML technologies that Google might have.
You'd think the various governments would put more effort into computer security. They appear not to care, though.
Edit: Gah. Now I checked my work Gmail spam folder. There was an email from one of my users there. (and nothing else)
Now I'm considering migrating away from Gmail, at least for work related things.
If email coming from google itself got special treatment there would be masses with pitchforks complaining about that.
You've made a lot of good points, but I don't think that's one of them.
It feels like Google no longer has any incentive to follow the rules, and they feel that they are going to be the ones to make the new rules. The rest of us end up having to implement workarounds.
I disagree. I think in the absence of that point, it would have been hard to say this:
> It doesn't look intentional (look at that fourth category!)
But also, I think special treatment for trusted actors is a completely appropriate way to handle email delivery, and I also think it's appropriate for gmail to trust themselves to be sending legitimate mail. Blocking their own email makes them look totally incompetent. They absolutely should whitelist themselves. And they should have a way for you to be whitelisted too, if you want to send email.
That is understandable. It is hard to validate if an email is authentic. SMTP has no authentication built in. Gmail can't just blindly accept all emails from addresses that you have already sent an email to.
EDIT:
Look at this example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Mail_Transfer_Protocol#...
Anyone can connect to relay.example.com and pretend to be [email protected].
All those "I hacked your email and send you a message from you account" I don't get, because I have a DMARC policy that says if you don't pass SPF/DKIM then you get rejected. So try as the spammer might to connect to my mailserver and pretend to be me, they can't, because my mailserver sees they're not authenticated, and the mailserver they're sending from isn't in my SPF records, isn't signing the message with my DKIM key and therefore it gets rejected at the SMTP level.
The article discusses mail not being accepted by google/gmail in the first place.
Messages they think you won't want to receive are what the spam folder is for.
The amount of spam that would be delivered if they didn't discriminate AT ALL is enormous.
They have to read all this feedback and discriminate better.
Yes there is. They don't want to carry traffic from anybody from the major email blacklists. If a mail server is on a real, very transparently-managed blacklist, no large provider should be accepting their smtp traffic.
To be fair, sometimes Google does send spam.
You'd think Google had an incentive to get that delivered.
But it still beats no filtering.
There are layers of filtering beyond what appears in your spam folder, layers that block obvious spam long before it gets anywhere near your account. If every email ever sent to your address wound up in your spam folder you'd beg for filtering.
Even after running it for years, Spamassassin never marked a legitimate mail as spam, so i'm pretty sure that if i wasn't too lazy to configure it to move it to a spam folder, it'd work fine. Stuff did pass through it (at a ratio of one every four or so) but i was fine with deleting those.
What i'm trying to say is that from personal experience, i'd be fine with a spam filter that errs on the side of not marking stuff for spam and me deleting whatever goes through manually. Having to see a bit of spam mail is small cost for losing mail i'm actually interested in.
- Legitimate class action notices related to Amazon purchases.
- Email coming from addresses to which I had already sent email. (!)
- Email from my landlord.
- Email coming from Google itself.
Based on the contents of my spam folder, which I have to check fairly often because of the extreme overaggressiveness, I would be vastly better off if nothing ever got filtered at all. [1]
>> There are going to be false positives, we will make mistakes, but we certainly care a lot about fixing issues like this when we hear about them.
This doesn't sound honest, or at least not complete. People have been complaining about this for years. I have personally been complaining about this for years. The loss of obviously legitimate email is completely outrageous.
It doesn't look intentional (look at that fourth category!), but it certainly doesn't look like anyone is trying to address the problem.
[1] Yes, if spam filtering was disabled, more spam might get sent.