Gmail spam is out of control

I'm more confused by the youtube comments. They have thousands of employees, couldn't they get an intern to write a bot that bans anyone who posts the same link in a dozen commment sections?

It’s the threaded conversations that sales people have with themselves, marked as important by gmail, that drives me mad.

“Hi Mark, Just wanted to close the loop today and see if it made sense for us to connect.”

“Hi Mark, I hope you are having a successful week. Did you manage to check on below email?”

“Checking in, Mark - do you have 15 minutes next week to discuss your goals?”

All unsolicited spam and all marked important by gmail. I just ignore most email these days. Seriously. People who know me know how to find me on closed loop systems like WhatsApp, Slack, etc. Gmail sucks.

I run my own mail setup with Postfix, Dovecot, and SpamAssassin. I've had great results with zero false positives and over 99% successful spam filtering after a little bit of tweaking and training the bayesian filter.

I have had legit emails end up in the spam folder since 2011 or so

gmail coders are dumb

It's completely bizarre to me that I can open and then mark as spam e-mails from the same sender half a dozen times without Gmail blocking mail from that address. Why even have the button?

One of my accounts is getting large amounts of obvious spam since at least 2021. I'm not using this email anywhere anymore so it's all the more puzzling for me.

I suspect they're going to bring out a "premium" spam filter at some point, as a way of monetizing individual Gmail accounts.

Strange, I have iCloud instead of Gmail, but I'm also receiving a humongous amount of spam recently too, and while (so far) it goes to the "Junk", it's still a bother when I check daily for missed messages.

Before I would get about 3 or 4 "Junk" messages per week, tops. Now it's more like 20-30 per day.

I wonder if spammers figured out some new method of not being blocked.

EDIT: Someone else is getting the same emails I am: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34898655

Now that you mention it, I've been getting bizzarre "Award/promotion" emails daily. All easily identifiable. Usually no proper formatted text and an attempt to load images.

Always from someone with "ace" in the email. It goes straight to report as spam but daily for the last few weeks they've been seeping in. It's annoying given how blatantly obvious spam they are.

I'm confused.

I have 7 Gmail accnts across my various personas and corps and spam has never been an issue.

Maybe actually take 10 seconds to mark things as spam and move on.

Maybe it helps that I pay for Google Workspace, but my pretty well known emails do not really receive that much "spam". However, it depends what you consider spam and I have a pretty strict definition to be automated junk/phishing messages I never consented to receiving. I also include non-"junk" mailing list messages (some semblance of not being a scam or coming from a semi-legit org) that I either never consented to.

I imagine for a lot of people they, unknowingly?, subscribed to a lot of things they don't end up caring about and never try to unsubscribe. In Gmail they can even automate this for you to some extent. And I am pretty sure they track that information and if a mailing list isn't respecting those unsubscribes their email is going to start being dropped entirely.

Consider the possibility they someone is subscribing you to nonsense? I think Gmail's filters work pretty well. In fact I am very surprised how well they work because for a while I was getting a ton of spam in the inbox and losing important messages (~max 3 years ago). Now I can't remember the last time it happened.

They are preparing for a premium service where AI will "resolve the spam problem in your inbox". Mark my words.

Substack spam is annoying. I do not need a dozen updates/week when I am subscribed to just 3 blogs.

I'd love to see a screenshot of an inbox with these messages if any one is so inclined.

It's so bad that the spammers don't even bother to spam via GCal emails.

Just one data point, but Gmail spam filter has been extremely good for me. I probably get like one spam make it's way into my inbox a month or so, and that's because it's a spam email sent from a new Gmail account to a very few other Gmail accounts. I always report it.

Genuinely useful emails ending up in spam happens rarely too.

When compared to any other email services I use, including my organization email, Gmail is way better at spam filtering - I imagine they're also doing it at scale since Gmail might be the most popular email service to attack for spammers.

I have noticed a huge uptick recently in emails (I use Gmail) from legitimate companies telling me the likes of: I registered but never logged in, I still have something in my cart or "thanks for your feedback - we'll be in touch".

I imagine it's spammers trying to screw up the spam filters but since most of them get through (makes sense), having to deal with the 20 or so a day is irritating.

It's such a shame, when they bought Postini[0], it was the pre-eminent email security product on the market, and was largely part of Gmail's anti-spam reputation. Since they discontinued it as a commercial concern, it seams to have languished.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postini

Edit: The controls in workspace are still good, but in all reality some kind of SEG is advisable.

You'd think that these billion dollar companies could defeat spam. It's sad really. Facebook is loaded with it in the comments. I keep getting those random emails you speak about, whether its related to pharma or trying to convince me I have an invoice for $382 with McAfee or Norton virus scanner. Not hard to note that once it's marked as "spam", it should be able to grab those keywords and pattern of text and block it. It doesn't seem like by allowing it there's much in it for them.

Definitely agree. It's been more like two years for me now. I get spam in my inbox, and similar emails from the same senders in my spam box too. The spam filter is definitely working, but it's leaking badly.

In my inbox now, obvious spam, subject "Verification", sender "You're Approved" with gibberish in the body. Auto insurance spam, also gibberish in body. A new one, "Emergencymail.org" and that's just in the last hour.

Worse: Gmail is labeling as spam emails that aren't. I send out email newsletters for my HOA using MailChimp and about 10% of the recipients (all Gmail users) never see the emails in their inbox. I've started texting them when there's a new email; half of them find it in their spam folder, half can't find it at all (and I see confirmation from the MailChimp side that the email was sent and did not result in an NDR).

You get what you pay for. Come join us over at Fastmail. The fee is low and the spam filters are superb.

All the best, a happy user of many years.

In recent weeks I have been receiving about a dozen spam messages every day from different .shop domains to my Gmail address. I've never seen this before.

At my business address on Office 365, we've been inundated with spam from different Gmail addresses but we have created more sophisticated rules that have helped handle the volume except for the Unicode-obfuscated stuff and password-reset phishing.

With respect, I wouldn’t say it’s out of control. Take a look at your spam folder. Obviously, I’d like to see it an improvement but I’m still amazed at how well they do.

I highly recommend uses unique email addresses for anything you sign up for. I do this on Fastmail and I can disable the alias/have it bounce incoming emails whenever I want. I vastly prefer this over filtering to garbage because I feel like it annoys the sysadmin that's sending the spam. I actually had my brokerage company send me a mean letter saying that I was required to give them a working email address or they'd close my account - hah.

i have been getting a lot of gmail spam recently also, and they all come from .gmail accounts too. its turned into a bunch of things from like

a.b.person.s.s.s@gmail.com,

person.a.b.s.s.s.s.s@gmail.com,

...

I don't suggest trying outlook if you're troubled by spam. Gmail seems to do a lotter better in prevention in my case.

Better than 365, which does exactly the same thing, but also sends tons of legitimate emails to spam with no way to prevent it.

Just another data point. I use gmail as my primary personal mail and I'm not seeing any uptick in spam making it to my inbox. The normal rate is very low, 1 every 2-3 months. I have a much higher incidence of random people using my email to sign up for things, and wrong address (i.e. the sender just typed my email by accident).

Hmm, I've always been rather impressed by Gmail's spam controls. It's really rare that a spam email gets through - maybe a couple of times a year at most. On the flip side, legitimate mails occasionally go into the Spam folder, maybe a couple a month.

Yes! I've noticed it's 10x worse for my professional email address than my personal one; nearly all of the spam that gets through Gmail's filters is (horribly targeted) B2B marketing. Is that what others are seeing too?

Most of mine lately are "people" sharing documents with me in Google drive

+1 i get so many obvious spam emails delivered to my gmail account yet they block / filter my emails any of the 3+ times i have tried to host my own email. The email monopoly/ centralization it out of control.

I can concur with this.

This week specifically I have noticed tons of scammy spams getting into my main inbox.

Up until this past weekend, almost all of them got caught in the spam folder, but there's an epidemic in my inbox this week.

They seem to be monetising the service more now (my free tier own-domain email for instance). Maybe this is the new strategy to drive buyers. I have not had an increase in spam on my paid-for service.

Ya mine has been very bad too for Gmail and outlook, wtf is going on?

Seems like this has been going on for over a month:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34411009

I'm more concerned with the newsletter I signed up for going into it's spam folder, and me not knowing how to force it to always go to the main folder

I'm getting them too. I know these emails are not going through paid accts (workspace). Are they trying to integrate bard with gmail?

Haha, nope, it never worked. Such issue started from the very first day. I was one of beta testers that got invitation from Google directly. I was super surprised that new created email address started to receive spams almost immediately. So I requested a blocking list to be implemented and was told something like "No, you don't need that, our spam filters are good enough...".

So be it.

Since 2006, my Gmail has hardly ever contained spam. Hotmail, however, receives over 600 each month.

I have had almost no spam with Google Workspaces (formerly GSUITE).

i dont use my gmail for yeads but just looked. my inbox has tons of garbage emails of various casing, 100s of obvious spam emails. very few went into spam

been going on for a few months for me, some where obviously spottable, Tons of word.s.like.this in the subject and also random numbers a la 12895830

it's not just gmail

I've been seeing a huge increase in Outlook.com, O365 (or is it M365 now?), and iCloud spam, too

report and move on is about all I can suggest

Personally not receiving any spam, whatsoever.

For me, it's spam FROM gmail.

why would somebody use gmail if there is fastmail.com?

Never had that problem my man. Stop entering your email in shitty websites

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