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Ask HN: Gmail spam filtering suddenly marking everything as spam?
Almost all transactional emails are being marked as suspicious even when their SPF/DKIM records are fine and they’ve been whitelisted before. Did Google break something in gmail/spam filtering?
- Aboutplants 8mo agoInteresting, I’ve had a lot of emails lately flagged as “Promotions” even when they were not.
- buildbot 8mo agoYep, getting this too.
- jeffbee 8mo agoThe weights in their filters are crowd-sourced, so the best thing you can do is mark them as not suspicious (if you are certain, of course). FWIW, I am not seeing this. My Spam label contains just spam. Finally, it would be good to know what you are observing. Are you seeing this as recipient or sender?
- goopthink 8mo agoAs a recipient. - Emails are being aggressively marked as “suspicious” out of the blue (USPS, HR emails, system emails, promotional emails) - Those emails are being regularly delayed by 7-10 minutes. - Priority inbox rules seem reset - “Never mark as spam” rules are seemingly not respected Additional reports on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/GMail/comments/1qln9zp/gmail_not_filtering_promotions/ https://www.reddit.com/r/GMail/comments/1qln9zp/gmail_not_fi...
- jeffbee 8mo agoThere's your confirmation, then. It must be either a localized failure to some subgroup of users, or triggered by some combination of settings, if some people are seeing it and others are not. Added: https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/incidents/NNnDkY9CJ36annsfytjQ https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/incidents/NNnDkY...
- jval43 8mo ago>Never mark as spam has never worked consistently. For literally 10+ years now, I've always had a few emails per day go into spam even though that rule is in place.
- whateveracct 8mo agoIs this why I keep getting ads in my Primary inbox?
- donutshop 8mo agoAbsolutely
- jgrahamc 8mo agoAh, this is why I've been receiving a bunch of very obvious spam/scam mails in my inbox.
- telliott1984 8mo agoI got a classic and obvious 419 scam email today. Kind of felt like I'd gone back to a simpler time.
- YoukaiCountry 8mo agoYeah my inbox looked like 2005 again—nothing but raw, unfiltered chaos.
- sss111 8mo agoAny ideas on how to deal with stopping spam emails in general, scripts/tools etc?
- B1FIDO 8mo agoStep zero. Never disclose your email address to anyone. This is very easy and straightforward. I operate 6 Gmail accounts, and three are "alts" where I've basically never given the address out to anyone at all, and they receive zero spam, zero UCE, zero marketing emails. Of course, on my "main" I've disclosed the address to many entities and I use it for sign-in and shipping and many things. And yes, I do receive spam and scam emails there, but wcyd?
- FractalParadigm 8mo agoI feel like an easier solution to having six different email addresses is to use Gmail aliases - I've caught a few less-than-honest companies either selling my email address, or been breached without disclosing such, simply by using an alias along the lines of '+service_name'. If any alias starts to receive spam you can setup rules to automatically delete everything that comes in with that. You also get the added benefit of significantly easier and more accurate search.
- B1FIDO 8mo agoI don't think y'all understand why I have separate Google accounts. I use them for different purposes. They are "role accounts" for projects I am doing, such as geneaology and astronomy. In order to use YouTube sanely, and store different stuff in Drive, I separate them into unique accounts. I use those accounts for specific things, and my YouTube subscriptions, playlists, etc. are tailored for each role, for example. This is not about email at all. Obviously, I can access all those email accounts through the one app on my smartphone or the one PWA on my Chromebook. They are easily manageable but separate. I also run 3 Outlook/Microsoft accounts, and for the same reason. (One of them is my academic account from community college, and the other two are personal.) I don't need to give out email addresses for the "role accounts" except where I "Sign In With Google" to various services. So I don't really send/receive email from them at all, except where I'm sharing links or documents with myself (the best way to do this cross-account is still by using email, oftentimes.)
- B1FIDO 8mo agoYes, my Gmail inbox is full of regular senders being flagged as "possibly unsafe" and I need to click a button "Looks Safe" to accept them. They are not being spamboxed, but they are definitely flagged. Even official communications from the USPS! The reason given is that "Gmail hasn't scanned this message", so I suppose the scanners are unavailable/disabled for the time being. They should also be tagged as "Important" but they are not. I believe this is a heuristic-based designation, and it has not been working too great lately. My most important mail is coming through as "unimportant".
- B1FIDO 8mo agoThey are not being marked as "Suspicious" but they are showing an infobox that explains they could not be scanned at all. You could click "Seems Safe" on these messages, but they are not scanned by Google, and they are simply adding a disclaimer that they currently can't vouch for the safety of a message that they couldn't scan. It seems to me that this is a prudent and helpful course of action.
- Aboutplants 8mo agoI feel like things have been going on a little bit longer than this indicates.
- czbond 8mo agoI have been receiving a large number of spam emails in my "Important and Unread" areas which is anomalous. I was wondering exactly why and this helps. thanks!
- VLM 8mo agoTwo related issues not mentioned yet: Its really slow. Too slow to use 2FA or in some cases, verify email addresses or recover passwords. Most people can't handle a notification on their watch every minute, or several spam every five minutes, so "large numbers of people" are shutting off notifications on their phones. And human nature being what it is, they're not going to be turned back on again. So the era of getting a notification when you get an email is coming to a close. "Important Immediate Attention Stuff" moved to text messages a long time ago anyway, at least for me. The list of technologies you can no longer reach me on, always increases over time...
- calin2k 8mo agothey (gmail/google) must have added AI to the email server.
- mychele 8mo agoThe promotions/updates/forums/etc classification is also down.
- zukzuk 8mo agoThis has been “down” for me for a few months now, ever since Google tied this functionality to the same toggle that opts you in for using your email data for AI training. So now you can’t filter this stuff without also agreeing to a whole swath of unrelated and opt-ins. Ive since gone on an unsubscribe campaign, and things seem bearable now.
- jeffbee 8mo ago> Google tied this functionality to the same toggle that opts you in for using your email data for AI training This never happened. It was a lie spread on Twitter. And now you are spreading it.
- zukzuk 8mo agoNot a lie, a potential misinterpretation if anything. Google has never factually countered the allegation, and now it’s before the courts in California. I’m going to wait and see how Thele v. Google plays out before turning this back on, and looking for alternatives in the meantime.
- SequoiaHope 8mo agoSame. Can’t ignore the messages when they’re all in one place, which makes hitting unsubscribe easier.
- dylan604 8mo ago> which makes hitting unsubscribe easier. wow, you really do that? Doesn't that just prove that the email address is read by a human and then promoted for even further SPAM to be delivered?
- tonymet 8mo agoGood on Google for having clear and timely outage notifications even for a minor to moderate subservice like spam detection.
- tonymet 8mo agoWow you can’t even give praise on HN without getting downvoted
- pushedx 8mo agoNoticed it immediately. I get a lot more spam messages per day than I thought that I did.
- Gazoche 8mo agoSame here. Until recently I would get maybe 1-2 spams a month, and I just got 30 in the span of a few days. They’re the very obvious, very obnoxious kind of spam, and Gmail still correctly sends them to the junk bin, so I wonder if they were shadowbanned before and Google simply decided to make the process more explicit (which I don’t hate on principle). Either that or my address was scrapped from somewhere by a spam bot and the timing is coincidental.
- jeffbee 8mo agoEverybody gets way more spam than they realize because Google doesn't deliver it to the spam label. 99% of it is rejected at SMTP time.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- robertcope 8mo agoMy wife was complaining this morning that her "promotions" were not getting sorted correctly. She will be happy to know it is an actual issue.
- cabirum 8mo ago[flagged]
- Waterluvian 8mo agoIs there some history behind the spam detector being those things or is this a vibe comment?
- blell 8mo agoWe get it, you hate AI. Here, your gold star.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- greesil 8mo agoNow, what about the Messages app? Starting last December I started receiving 10 spam SMS messages a day. Previously it was maybe one per week.
- DANmode 8mo agoControl your phone number better. Only answer numbers you recognize, everyone else gets voicemail. Cell phone spam is a 10 year+ old memory for me.
- dang 8mo agoSee also https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/incidents/NNnDkY9CJ36annsfytjQ https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/incidents/NNnDkY... (from other threads that we merged hither)
- j45 8mo agoI have seen a spam button show up I haven't seen in a long time. It might be a new round of AI training featuring the labour of customers as free employees doing training. Every time we click, we consent to sharing private email data.
- randerson 8mo agoIt's a great reminder of how good this feature is that we take for granted. I think this outage has actually improved my appreciation for Gmail (a service I normally only complain about).
- sbrother 8mo agoSeriously. I didn't even realize this was a wide issue, but I couldn't find a school enrolment email I was looking for this morning, and found it in the spam folder. The fact that I basically never have to do this is actually amazing.
- Marsymars 8mo agoI wonder about difference in experience that different people have with gmail’s spam filter. In my case, the majority of emails that go to my gmail spam folder are legitimate. I don’t actually receive much spam, a single-digit number of emails per month (in the past 30 days, 2 emails), so any time I see anything in my spam folder I have to check so that I can rescue the email if legitimate.
- Grimblewald 8mo agoThis is my experience also. Closely guarded email, haven't received _any_ spam to it to date, but a large volume of false positives. This, among other reasons, actually led to my setting up my own email server again. Gmail is a great product if you don't know what you're doing or have avaliable to you. It's like a McDonalds burger. Not inpressive, not good, bot bad either, and certainly won't offend anyone while being accessible --- but calling it good is a bit out of touch with what good looks like.
- Marsymars 8mo agoI kinda expect there are a lot of false positives that people just never notice because they've got also thousands of unread (non-spam) emails in their inbox and never check their spam to see if there's anything legitimate there.
- SoftTalker 8mo agoI don't understand why spam detection is so complicated. I can tell with high accuracy if an email is spam just by the subject line. I'd think even basic ML could do this very reliably you don't need a bleeding-edge LLM to do this. Phishing is tricker because it can be very deceptive especially if you're being targeted specifically. But also usually pretty obvious.
- chistev 8mo agoThey can tweak the subject to something not obviously spammy.
- plagiarist 8mo agoObviousness in spam is a feature, they don't have to waste effort on people who know better.
- Nextgrid 8mo agoThis only applies to spam which requires significant follow-up effort from the spammer to respond to potential victims; effectively just 419 "advance-fee" fraud scams. For spam which only does not require manual effort on the other side, there is no reason to filter out potential victims and all the more reason to make it look as legit as possible to maximize conversion rates.
- takanot 8mo ago> For spam which only does not require manual effort on the other side, there is no reason to filter out potential victims and all the more reason to make it look as legit as possible to maximize conversion rates. Unless there's a trade-off. Saying "respond now or your account will be erased!" doesn't sound very legit. But the number of additional victims the phisher gets by doing probably outweighs the number of more sophisticated victims he loses.
- PaulDavisThe1st 8mo agoORLY? * Are you available? * Paul, can we have a zoom meeting with you on Monday? * Assistance for donation * Greetings!!! * some ideas for you * Refund request * Somethings not working * Manuel Montoya for roof work contractor * proposals for print * Invite Connection Half of the above are actual spam, half are not. Tell me which is which ...
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- TechRemarker 8mo agoAhh. Wok up to a follow up email an address already marked as spam so couldn't figure out what was going on.
- exabrial 8mo agoActually having the opposite problem, I'm getting 50+ emails that SHOULD be marked as spam.
- nubinetwork 8mo agoThe only thing in my gmail spam box is some ad for a pirate tv streaming service that's probably a scam...
- jokethrowaway 8mo agoIt's been happening for about a month for me. I had to start monitoring spam because legit emails end up there. Funnily enough I started having the opposite problem too - plenty of obvious spam and phishing attempt ending up in my mailbox. I had to make a bunch of filters on my side. One more reason to migrate to Proton
- Tade0 8mo agoI've had Stack Overflow's last newsletter of 2025 land in spam, which was strange because surely they didn't lose relevance that much yet, did they?
- ianberdin 8mo agoMaybe Gmail knows something?
- Zigurd 8mo agoBriefly, this morning, I had the opposite effect happen to my Gmail inbox in which things that would normally land in the social and updates folders ended up in my primary folder. I don't know which I'd be more freaked out by: a broken Gmail spam filter or 18 inches of snow.
- bryant 8mo agoConcur, I've had Promotions land in my Primary inbox for at least a few hours.
- northtwilight 8mo agoYes, me as well. Thought I had mistakenly changed something but I hadn't. Have also noticed that ad blockers stopped working last week; now as well as the wrong routing in Gmail, that casting to Chromecast from Chrome stopped working today. Good job Google!
- lazide 8mo agoAlso, I went into spam and check and moved a few convos out - and when I did, the message said, literally, ‘(null) conversations moved’… Vibe coding catching up on us all?
- kull 8mo agoThis. Same, got a lot of spam getting to my inbox this morning.
- EGreg 8mo agoThat. Why in 2062 are so many people still reduced to merely describing what happens, and have no power to fix it themselves? These big corporations can roll out anything and we’ll all roll over and take it. Neuralink 7.0 completely changed everyone’s personality and people bitched for a while but ultimately no one can do anything about it. They promised to bring back choice of features but it’s been a decade and so far just more enshittification
- 8mo ago
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- zahlman 8mo agoI see nothing amiss on my oldest Gmail account. But then, I get probably <1 spam email a day on average, and even less legitimate mail, and even less that isn't an automatic notification of something or other that's already filtered and categorized by sender.
- grvdrm 8mo agoI seem to be experiencing the opposite! Lots of spam flowing through.
- deckar01 8mo agoGoogle just let through an email spoofed from my own domain (via a mailgun server). It was a phishing attack about the domain being shut down. The connection between the domain name and my personal email address have never been published. Either google or Squarespace leaked the info.
- deckar01 7mo agoEdit: The attacker didn’t actually know my email address. The google domain had a catch all email forwarding config that squarespace botched. Apparently they can spoof emails from my domain on a mailgun server as long as it’s to an email address on my domain.
- callumprentice 8mo agoThank goodness. My Gmail address is my first name so I typically get many hundreds of spam’s a day which are almost all caught. Dozens in my inbox today so I figured something was up. Glad it’s not that the spam pedlars have suddenly gotten clever.
- tomcam 8mo ago> My Gmail address is my first name It's good to be you! My wife and I both have 3-letter first names so we never had that option, despite getting in on the Gmail beta 20+ years ago.
- dvh 8mo agoI have the opposite problem. I'm receiving 30 spams every day with links to Google's own domain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665414
- notenlish 8mo agoToday gmail labelled an email coming from google search console as potentially dangerous, however it was because it couldn't properly do spam filtering on the email.
- anonym29 8mo agoI'm having the exact opposite issue. 30+ emails today that clearly belong in spam (fake package delivery, "failed payment for your cloud subscription", etc) have landed in my inbox.
- maximinus_thrax 8mo agoSo thankful for this development. This was the final nudge I needed to finally ditch Gmail, after 20something years.
- mediumsmart 8mo agoProbably graiduation day
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- varshith17 8mo agoGoogle's spam filter is having a moment. Even emails with perfect auth records are getting flagged - clearly a broken model deployment. Mark legitimate emails as "not spam" aggressively. They'll either rollback or your local filter will adapt. This happens every 6-12 months with Gmail.
- varshith17 8mo agoNot just you, widespread reports on /r/gmail and Twitter since ~12 hours ago. Likely a bad model push on Google's end. Workaround: check spam folder for legit mail, mark as "not spam" + star important senders to retrain your filter faster. Usually resolves in 24-48h when they rollback.
- black_puppydog 8mo agoI disabled google's spam filter years ago for this sort of issue. The final straw was that it flagged a response from my boss, to an email I had sent earlier that day, resulting in a missed meeting. Installed thunderbird to access the company mail, never looked back. Private gmail is unused, only ever created it for android sign-up back in the day. As with search, I don't get why people still use google.
- corn13read2 8mo agoJust switch themail.host and never look back...
- saidnooneever 8mo agovibecoding im sure