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Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by jimrandomh on Thursday March 05, 2015 @10:43AM (#9151340)
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.

Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by michaelt on Thursday March 05, 2015 @04:21PM (#9153898)
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

Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by kllrnohj on Thursday March 05, 2015 @10:48AM (#9151380)
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.

Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by larrys on Thursday March 05, 2015 @11:00AM (#9151476)
That doesn't help occasional important people who might send you an email that you might miss because it ends up in spam.
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by shiggerino on Thursday March 05, 2015 @11:09AM (#9151553)
It would also be nice if you could disable spam filtering entirely and run your own client-side.
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by clogston on Thursday March 05, 2015 @01:24PM (#9152729)
> 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-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.

Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by shiggerino on Thursday March 05, 2015 @02:55PM (#9153392)
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.
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by TeMPOraL on Thursday March 05, 2015 @12:32PM (#9152280)
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...
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by pyrocat on Thursday March 05, 2015 @04:07PM (#9153822)
add a filter. From: *@amazon.com -> never mark as spam.
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by ibz on Thursday March 05, 2015 @11:01AM (#9151489)
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?
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by taeric on Thursday March 05, 2015 @11:16AM (#9151625)
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.
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by npsimons on Thursday March 05, 2015 @11:48AM (#9151898)
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.
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by guelo on Thursday March 05, 2015 @11:50AM (#9151911)
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.
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by ccozan on Thursday March 05, 2015 @11:47AM (#9151883)
I would not recommend this. Amazon emails can be unsubscribed. And they are not really spam, they are not coming unsolicited, aren't they?
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by thaumasiotes on Thursday March 05, 2015 @12:46PM (#9152400)
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.
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by nitrogen on Thursday March 05, 2015 @01:28PM (#9152771)
Emails in response to you direct action (placing an order) are the very definition of solicited email.
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by thaumasiotes on Thursday March 05, 2015 @01:44PM (#9152905)
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?
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by johnduhart on Thursday March 05, 2015 @03:04PM (#9153449)
> 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.

Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by thaumasiotes on Thursday March 05, 2015 @03:51PM (#9153722)
OK. When was the last time facebook emailed you to confirm that you liked a comment?
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by cptn_brittish on Friday March 06, 2015 @02:06AM (#9155958)
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.
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by thaumasiotes on Friday March 06, 2015 @03:22AM (#9156136)
Yes, I picked facebook as an example specifically because of their reputation for emailing you about everything. But I think you'll find that they tend to email you when other people do something that, in some sense, concerns you, not when you do something. (Remember the ancestor comment defining "solicited email" as email that responds to an action you take.) "This person just liked your comment" emails are plausible. "You just liked this person's comment" emails are self-evidently absurd, but they fall perfectly within the (spurious) definition of "solicited" that nitrogen wants us to believe in.
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by snowwrestler on Thursday March 05, 2015 @11:52PM (#9155652)
My grocery store gives me a printed receipt when I pay for my groceries. And I don't ask them to do that--they just print one up and hand it to me.

Amazon can't give you a printed receipt because you are not there, physically. So they send you an email instead.

This is not that hard to understand.

Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by thaumasiotes on Friday March 06, 2015 @03:14AM (#9156111)
Stores don't give you receipts for your benefit. They print receipts to make sure the cashier isn't dipping into the cash register.
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by snowwrestler on Friday March 06, 2015 @09:10PM (#9160675)
Card processors require retailers to provide transaction receipts to cardholders.
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by gaadd33 on Thursday March 05, 2015 @03:53PM (#9153733)
Every time I order groceries. Then again my grocery store is online.
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by TeMPOraL on Thursday March 05, 2015 @12:36PM (#9152316)
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.

Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by npsimons on Thursday March 05, 2015 @03:15PM (#9153512)
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.

Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by rev_bird on Thursday March 05, 2015 @11:46AM (#9151873)
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.
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by throwawayaway on Thursday March 05, 2015 @11:05AM (#9151513)
well i've started marking ebay, linkedin and google+ stuff as spam. i'm sure somebody else did amazon the same favour...

so... sorry? :)

Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by npsimons on Thursday March 05, 2015 @11:50AM (#9151915)
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.
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by throwawayaway on Thursday March 05, 2015 @12:56PM (#9152504)
it should be opt in instead of opt out then shouldn't it? maybe you should be directing your passion at those who feel opt out is appropriate.
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by npsimons on Thursday March 05, 2015 @03:05PM (#9153457)
And that's why I said: "but if you signed up for it, at least put in the same amount of effort to get out of it first."

If you signed up, then you opted in. Don't be lazy and mark things you signed up for as spam. I'm not understanding how people get email from Amazon that aren't customers, and how customers can't turn off everything but confirmations, which I know is possible, because I have.

Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by throwawayaway on Thursday March 05, 2015 @05:10PM (#9154194)
> how customers can't turn off everything but confirmations

I'm a customer, I consider that opt out. You don't? I signed up for amazon, not their bullshit emails. That you consider the situation opt in shows they have you trained well.

Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by npsimons on Friday March 06, 2015 @10:47AM (#9157564)
Nice, ad hom, and I can't downvote your insulting comment! How about this: are you too lazy to uncheck a few check boxes? Because that's all it takes, and then you'll only get order and shipping confirmations.
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by throwawayaway on Friday March 06, 2015 @03:26PM (#9159364)
You shouldn't be insulted, I said you were trained well. Yes, I am too lazy to opt out of spam that should be opt in. Lazy like a fox.
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by marcosdumay on Thursday March 05, 2015 @12:29PM (#9152260)
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.

Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by thaumasiotes on Thursday March 05, 2015 @12:50PM (#9152443)
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?
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by throwawayaway on Thursday March 05, 2015 @05:37PM (#9154377)
http://imgur.com/yqsYyPY

of the 64 emails I have from them 50 are spam of this nature.

Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by Tiksi on Friday March 06, 2015 @12:50AM (#9155783)
And if you open any of them, there is a convenient link to unsubscribe from them:

http://paste.click/fOAtyL

Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by throwawayaway on Friday March 06, 2015 @04:30AM (#9156309)
Are you saying they are opt out? because I think that is what you are saying? Way to miss the point.
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by Tiksi on Friday March 06, 2015 @10:49AM (#9157592)
No I'm saying you opted in, and can now opt back out.
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by throwawayaway on Friday March 06, 2015 @03:27PM (#9159367)
didn't!
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by thaumasiotes on Friday March 06, 2015 @03:18AM (#9156124)
I can't help but notice that all of those come from amazon.co.uk. As evidence-free speculation, perhaps there's a problem at a lower level than "Amazon the company". This sort of thing would certainly help explain why some people are extremely upset about spam from "Amazon" and other people are taking the position "you're crazy".
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by npsimons on Friday March 06, 2015 @10:51AM (#9157600)
You signed up to be their customer, and you can turn these off. That they do this by default isn't ideal, but it's not spam - you have a business relationship with them.
Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by throwawayaway on Friday March 06, 2015 @03:25PM (#9159355)
it is spam.

just because i signed up for amazon.com, doesn't mean they get to spam me crap because they've buried a 2pt font unsubscribe feature that may or may not work over the course of a few weeks.

Re:Google seems to have broken email forwarding by npsimons on Thursday March 05, 2015 @03:01PM (#9153427)
I call bullshit. I'm a very regular Amazon customer, and I never ever receive anything but order and shipping confirmations from them (and the occasional interview offer). Can't remember if I did anything special (like uncheck a few boxes), but I'm very sure it's possible to not be spammed by them as my inbox is proof.