Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?

For the last year or so I've noticed an increasing amount of my legitimate professional interactions going into my "Promotions" tab in Gmail. The effect of which has been, after discovering a few mishaps of this sort, to now regularly and meticulously go through a massive pile of "Promotions" just to make sure I haven't missed something legitimately urgent or important. Prior to Google's classification errors producing this particular anxiety I used to basically treat the "Promotions" tab as spam to never look at. Now I'm going through all of it with prejudice which means I'm waaaaaaay more aware of marketing drivel than I used to be. As such, I'm pretty sure this "error" is intentional on Google's part to produce exactly this outcome of drawing eyeballs to inbox advertising.

YES! I posted about this two weeks ago, one person agreed but the post never got any traction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28437472

I haven't heard anything about this when I asked colleagues / IRL friends... I wonder what is going on over at Google

I have exactly the opposite problem: tons of legitimate email is getting flagged as Spam by GMail.

It's now happening regularly with emails from people in my contacts with whom I regularly exchange messages.

Mind-boggling. I know spam filtering is a hard problem, but these are just obvious misses.

Yet legitimate mail from my server with valid DKIM, DMARC, SPF, PTR record, decade old domain lands in spam. Good job, AI first Google/Gmail.

I have two accounts with google, one is personal and the other is through work.

My personal account is pretty clean and rarely does anything get through that shouldn't. Occasionally I find something in the spam filter that shouldn't be there, usually password resets.

My work account is seeing a big increase in "professional" spam. "Hey Guy, did you see my last email I sent . . .", "Hey Guy, we are the top network security consultants . . ." Many of them are getting tagged Important. Some of them are so left field it doesn't make any sense that they are listed as important. Here's a good one:

"You asked for it, and we made it. We are delighted to present a complete redesign of our Merge Rules in Duplicate Check." - coming from mta.exacttarget.com

How is that not spam and how did it get tagged important? I have no idea who this company is. I've never done business or corresponded with them.

As I write this I'm coming to the realization that I'm a mechanical turk working for Google to find and report.

What's interesting is that many of the emails are coming from clear email marketing sources like HubSpot and Exact Target. Why would those get bumped up? I also notice some coming from something like xxxx.outbound.protection.outlook.com - not sure what that is exactly, but it mostly comes from companies directly marketing using their spf and dkim domain, but seems to passing through outlook.com.

Email is dying but will never be dead.

Have gotten multiple such emails the last couple of weeks.

I think Googles spam detection is a bit too much lax when the sender itself is using gmail.

These might as well be hacked accounts which have already proven themselves to be valid and "human" at a previous point in time? I doubt gmails spam detection would let a brand new account spam CC'd emails without any sort of detection.

Lately, I've been noticing emails getting flagged as spam that are:

a) replies to emails I sent b) have anything to do with topics I'm actively involved with c) from senders who I have marked as not spam dozens of times

I never used to check the spam filter, now I do almost daily.

Yes, I keep getting a bunch of “Your GEICO quote 1234” variations. My thought is spam is like weather fronts at this point: while it feels like that subject line should be obviously flagged up, there is probably some other storm of porn bot spam that is causing the machine learning or filters to bend in just such a way that the car insurance spam can seep through.

In my case, the spam that manages to evade Gmail's filters contain an image as the body instead of text.

Fun fact: Back in 2002 ycombinator founder Paul Graham wrote an article on spam filtering. (See http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html ). I emailed him that his method can be defeated by sending an image of the text, as opposed to the text itself. PG replied and pointed me to this FAQ: http://www.paulgraham.com/spamfaq.html

In the FAQ there is an entry named "What if spammers sent their messages as images?" The answer indicates that is not going to be an issue, because there's still plenty of signals to go by.

Guess PG was wrong!

I just got one like this 5 minutes ago. They are getting clever i saw that they are embedding this.

onload="document.location.replace(window.atob('aHR0cHM6Ly9ibG9jay1jaGFpbi1ib3gudGsvbXpwaWwvP3RldHRoa3Yg'));"

Which if you decode you get a strange domain.

I assume gmail only looks for urls which in this case is not visible without decoding it

Yep, got one 3 days ago that matches your description perfectly. Russian sender name, HTML attachment about Elon/Bitcoin, etc.

Maybe these emails are coming from real users that got hacked? That's probably the easiest way to get past the filter.

Just another reason to ditch Google all together. I've been using Fastmail (paid, happily so) with my own domain for about 4 years now, and have been gradually changing all my online accounts that were using my gmail.com address to my own domain. Reduces Google's surveillance abilities (to some extent) and I don't have this problem at all.

Also, I use a desktop email client (Spark on MacOS) with IMAP/SMTP. Massive improvement over any webmail client, especially GMail.

Yes, and don't forget to check your spam folder regularly because a bunch of legit email ends up in there too.

Glad to see this posted, I got the exact same email this morning: Russian name from a Gmail account, subject that looks just like that (i.e. "long license plate number") and a .htm file. Was very surprised to see it get through GMail's filters.

Yes, it seemed to coincide with a notification I got that my Email was exposed on the dark web as a result of some hack. I forget which one but it was about 6-8 weeks ago I think.

I keep marking them as spam but more keep coming. About 1-2 per day and of varying content but similar visual layout. 90s era spam is a good description.

I've been having a batch of really obvious spam getting past Hotmail's filtering. After years of Hotmail being bad, Microsoft got really good at spam filtering there and I haven't really had issues with spam for close on a decade. It rarely hits my inbox.

This last month, maybe two, I've had extremely obvious spam hit my inbox repeatedly. Picking two cases from today, the subject is the same "FWD: FINAL CALL", from two different senders, "A P P L E" and "NET FLIX". The pattern is pretty much always the same, it's immediately obvious that it's spam. No idea why it's slipping past when they're still catching hundreds a day (I've had this hotmail account from the early days of the platform, used it a bunch all over the place)

I don't have a direct answer to your question, but I want to suggest a possible solution. I've been getting almost no spam for the last 10+ years even though I don't use any spam filtering (neither in my email client nor with my email service provider).

What I did was to switch from Gmail to a paid email provider. Then I started giving every single business a unique email alias, though my friends all get the same email alias. Currently I have 370 active aliases. I've had to disable only 20 aliases in the whole decade which works out to only about 5% of my contacts.

As I said, I use no spam filtering whatsoever, so I find it amazing that Gmail users with spam filtering have such a different experience.

Yes - I commented about the same awhile ago. How are spam filters not grabbing these "Amazon gift card" offers like the one I received below.

https://imgur.com/4efNttg

Yes, it started in the last 3-4 days. I was going to ask on here if there were any high-profile data breaches recently. I never used Epik.

Yes. After literally years of never having to worry about gmail spam, really obvious stuff has been coming in for the last few months.

I'm getting exactly those kind. Russian (I assume) name for the sender, gmail.com email address (From: "Арслан Минаев" ), .htm attachment with spammy filename (Your Business 01836.htm). Random numbers for the content. Headers indicate DKIM and SPF passed, and it looks for all intents and purposes like a legit gmail email. But it's spam.

Yep. This has happened a few times over the years and always seems to resolve after a while. I guess in the eternal game of cat and mouse in the world of spammers, sometimes the mouse gets the cheese.

I had same problem in last few months, advertising t-shirt/pill emails.

Another kind of spam mail like this is they use google docs or sharepoint to add a huge CC list.

However, defending them is hard and I think I can share my knowledge on topic of spam filtering(given I run an email forwarding service (https://mailwip.com) and have to deal with spam a lot)

When an email come from gmail/hotmail(any popular free email service) itself, it's harder to detect spam, especially if the email is in a non English language.

It has a few way to flag spams:

- Look at the IP address: - Look at the structure of emails: follow best practice, such as html/text plain part, has right mime encoding etc - Look at header of emails: no weird header, no "bad" ip in received chains - Look at attachment file type, virus scan those attachment - Finally, tokenize content of the email to find similar email that are flagged as spam

When the email come from their own IP, send out by gmail themselves, email format looks good, DKIM/SPF all pass and this is the first kind of email then the only way to flag spam is by analyze content. And if the email is in non English language, it's harder to analyze. Especially if not enough people flagged it as spam to train the naieve bayes tokenizer then we're out of luck here. The long CC list looks like a legitimate indicator for spam, but librarian/scool has a tradition of sending out a huge CC of entire class/department, sometime even BCC which make the email looks very suspicious (undisclose recipient) yet they are legitimate email so the CC alone cannot easily be used for spam indicator.

Yet, at the same time, legitimate emails form your own server get flagged because low reputation or a history of previous owner send spam...

I'm very surprised to hear that I'm not the only one getting spams in my inbox and legitimate emails in the spam folder for more than a month.

I thought that Google had some sort of metrics and would spot this issue if it was widespread, but it seems they don't even bother.

Do they even care about Google search and GMail? They're getting worse and worse.

Not really a new issue. I have an old Gmail account that I don't use as my primary email anymore. However since it's still attached to some services that use Google SSO I have reason to check it occassionally. The amount of spam that makes its way pass the Gmail filter is on the order of hundreds of emails a week. Fastmail on the other hand seem to do a lot better, generally only 1-2 spam making its way to my inbox a day, and never any legitimate mail marked as spam in the several years I've used them. Even Outlook (which I use at work) seems to do a lot better although it sends legitimate emails to my spam folder more than I'd like. YMMV.

Yes, but also getting obvious non-spam going to spam, likewise with it being categorized as Promotions. It got to a point that I don't filter by Category now, I just have a standard 'Inbox' with Starred at the top.

I'm getting a lot more spam (and by that, I mean like 3-5 per week, but before recently in was 0), and they also have the same format, but a different one from yours.

A random IP is the first text in it, and a vast majority say they originate from .co.uk. It's generally trying to get me to participate in a survey, or I've won a card from Home Depot (a big DIY supply/hardward chain in the US).

(edit) I just got one of the Russian ones noted by the OP; first one I've gotten so far.

Yep, plenty of new spam that's passing Gmail's spam filters. I'm seeing variations on a common format:

From: seemingly.real.name@gmail.com To: several apparently real Gmail addresses Subject: (no subject) Blank body apparently, PDF attached which the web and mobile previews indicate is of a pretty young woman, possibly porn (I've not opened any).

Another variation, the same as above with random words as the subject, such as "shallop escape clause unfilled orders crockitude". This is an actual example from my inbox.

Another, same again, but with nonsense in the subject and body, e.g. "48046256 of hlbezmy". Actual example again. I noticed that the preview image of the PDF in this example has a yellow-green tinge, possibly an attempt to disguise flesh-tones?

And so on. And on, and on, and on. It smacks of a very deliberate, industrial scale approach either at training the filters, or at exploiting weak spots that have already been discovered.

As another commenter has pointed out, this spam really does feel like 90s spam all over again. This made me wonder, is it possible that 90s-flavour spam is a result of 90s-flavour filters falling out of favour and being dropped or becoming under-trained? Are we doomed to endless cycles of spam revivals?

Just putting out my experience with spam. I have a generic gmail email since 2008, & bought few dozen domains over these years for personal use, with varying tlds.

Since 2018 I am getting almost a spam rain, see statistics & logs of spam in this published google sheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSdZyRvDd0ES...

Almost every email has no text, just an image, with a text footer with Unsubscribe. But clicking each unsubscribe tells spammer this email address is hot & live. I made this mistake of clicking Unsubscribe few times in 2018. Now about few weeks ago I loaded images on one of the email by mistake.

Domains these emails sent from are typo, subjects are stupid offers.

A filter adds a label to these emails & deletes them. A google apps script runs once every 24 hours, fetches data from these emails with label X in trash, adds that data to Log Sheet I linked above. Then script removes the tag.

Yup, getting a few of these each day and manually marking them as Spam (to no avail). Not sure how GMAIL's filter is missing them. A simple regex matcher would catch 99% of those. It seems like even the gmail registration process for the SPAM accounts has been automated?

Some other examples: Чарльз Некрасов Фома Авдеев Порфирий Угримов

Yes, but fortunately on a secondary account. My main account still seems to be safe from it, but my secondary account has been getting spammed to hell the past week. CCs are the same username @ aol.com and other domains, which is amusing because those aren't domains I've ever used (with that username, and I haven't used AOL since 1995 or so).

I’ve honestly been wondering if IT has started testing my personal email account to make sure I don’t fall for fishing scams.

I've recently had the experience of getting a spam email that allowed the spammer to add an appointment to my Google Calendar without my permission - even though I never enabled such a feature, never communicated with the sender before, and didn't reply or star or have them in my contacts. Wtf.

I've been getting email-to-sms texts at odd hours from gmail addresses for a while now.

We get tons and tons of gmail spam inbound to our non-gmail email server - every single day for years.

If I complain to Google we get more, its uncanny.

Seriously, fuck Gmail. Gmail can die in fire. Biggest spam service on the internet.

Yes, I get the exact same thing, Russian sender, some weird code in the subject line and some sort of attachment. I guess they found a way past the spam filter. I just report spam and I'm sure Google will update their algorithm to catch these things.

Yes, and other people I know don't have the same problem. Making me think that everyone who has this issue is part of some A/B testing [1] bucket for an internal Gmail spam filtering experiment.

These A/B tests are quite common for products like these to test new features, such as a new spam filtering algorithm. Or even test the efficiency of an existing spam filtering algorithm by degrading the experience of a subset of users.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/B_testing

I've been receiving spam for years in Gmail.

Some years ago a not so bright product manager decided that dots are not important.

My address used to be surname.name@gmail.com, and I've been receiving email for surnamename@gmail.com for years.

I get spam emails in my normal inbox titled "confirmation" with a body made out entirely of images, addressed to "@aol.com" but also sent to me.

I'm receiving some spam emails in the inbox folder since spring. They are clearly spam.

I analized 2 arrived this morning: both have 2 message-id header, one from gmail the other from sendgrid; both have a in-reply-to header (that is used for ARC and DKIM signature); both have 2 DKIM-Signature... both have the same CaMelCasE html... both are flagged as spam by a corporate antispam and my own spamassassin... one message has fake Received: headers with date in year 2019...

gmail has all the information to mark them as spam

Gmail's Chat now has a feature to forward an individual message to your inbox. I kept clicking on that feature and all the forwards from Google were in the Gmail Spam folder.

Gargh.

Yes, I only mentioned it today to two coworkers who hadn't seen it on their mailboxes. I've been getting a few a week, some go to spam and some don't.

I've been getting these for a couple of months too. I don't speak Russian so I just picked a couple of common Cyrillic characters and created a filter that dumps any email with any such character in the spam folder.

What's more annoying than the emails is that I'm getting Google drive documents shared with me with in a similar format from Russian senders. There doesn't seem to be a way to block or spam sort Google drive docs.

I'm getting the exact same spam messages in my Inbox. Gmail has been working wonderfully for years, but lately something changed. I've also noticed marking messages from the same sender (confirmed by checking headers) as Spam doesn't move them to Spam, I keep receiving them to Inbox. It's intermittent, not sure what's going on but I can't rely on their filtering system like I used to.

I don’t use gmail, but I have also been getting some obvious spam through my filters as well - usually nothing makes it to my actual inbox, but lately there have been 5-6 per day.

I use a Bayesian filter trained on old spam (I haven’t retrained it in years) combined with Spamhaus blocklists. My guess is that spammers found a clever way to fool the Bayesian filter, or they found new hosts to send email from in order to bypass blacklists.

I've gotten one of these every few days for the last couple weeks. It's bizarre. I report all as spam and haven't gotten one since Friday.

I think the spammers (actually scammers) just got smarter since bitcoin scam and crypto locker are profitable. I think they create a “burner” gmail account and first train google spam filters to think that gmail account is valid (short email conversations, not links, etc. for about year). Then they burn the account in few days. And then next one…

I heard that one gang makes/burns 1000+ gmail addressed per day.

Yes. I mark everyone of them as spam and block. Yet I continually get these emails with html files attached to them. It's extremely frustrating

My wife is having huge problems launching her business because gmail keeps eating her incoming and outgoing emails at random. It is really tough finding reliable email w/ support since Yahoo and Google turned it into a loss leader. If you felt a blast of cold today it was because I suggested she look at Office 365 since so could get support, and I think that put out hell’s pilot light.

yes. I have been getting russian language spam in my main inbox for a week or so. I don't know russian.

However, even weirder is a series of emails I've been getting for nearly a month now. They are always from randomized emails and claim to be different people but they are always about someone named Becca and some guy. Sometimes they are accusing me of being this guy and harassing Becca. Sometimes they are saying someone stole Becca's phone and was impersonating her friends. The weird thing is that none of these have any links.

Here's one from yesterday: "Beverly hacked all your stuff made fake account of you on Facebook apparently you have a new house and going to hurt Becca if she doesn't stay away from you . Apparently according to the rude message Becca Lynn received y'all aren't friends anymore ... That made Becca cry " But there aren't any links or anything like I would expect if it was typical phishing emails. Maybe they are just sending things out hoping someone will respond?

I had trouble that for one of my addresses forwarding to my gmail account systematically all of them got sent to spam, even if it's literally a reply to a message that I sent from gmail and repeatedly set "not spam" at it. In the end the only thing that worked was to add an explicit filtering rule saying "never send to spam" for that address.

The specific email you've listed here the format of a well known scam. There's been a tonne of this for filters to train on.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-elon-musk...

I'll be the one to say no, I haven't had any spam in my inbox recently. No false positives either.

I find that every year or two there's a spammer that figures out a new technique and gets a couple of emails past the filter, but usually no more than a couple, and none recently. I don't see a trend toward less or more effectiveness of spam filtering overall.

For a number of years now, my Spam folder has become my secondary Inbox. Legitimate & important email gets flagged as spam which forces me to check my spam folder constantly.

And like you, obvious spam sits in my Inbox without being flagged as spam. It seems on a long enough timeline, spammers just get better at making email look legit.

Funny story: A week ago, I received an email from a website monitoring service saying that my site was up. I wondered for a second why I didn't get an email saying that my site had been down first. Eventually I realized that I probably did get it, but it went into my Gmail spam. Sure enough, I checked my spam folder, and there it was.

SPAM filters are useless anyway. I only filter the shit that don't even adhere to proper SMTP protocol and let everything in. I just mentally ignore SPAM in my inbox.

Simple filters in free software don't do much unless you spend your energy tweaking it, sophisticated filter like Gmail's has a hidden agenda against you.

After almost a decade of near zero spam with gmail, I'm getting these weirdly obvious spam emails for various kinds of insurance where the whole email is composed of photos containing the text. I'm frustrated that they keep coming in despite reporting all of them as spam. Surely this is obvious spam.

One of the most common bypassed by spammers I get, a bunch of gibberish with a cc email of my name @aol.com, then if I open the email I get an image to load as a promo or marketing poster. Marking them as spam does not work, they keep going to my inbox. Filters don’t have an option to auto Mark as spam either.

Yes, for me, gmail spam getting into my inbox increased from zero to one or two per day a few weeks ago.

It's very obvious; I'm sure the gmail team must know about it. I'd be curious to know whether they're planning on returning the spam detection back to the previous low false-negative rate.

Yes, big time. I've been getting one or two of these a week for the past month now. Glad it's not only me. I'm really curious who's behind it, if the sender addresses were purpose made or otherwise hacked, and where the destination addresses were sourced from.

Yes. I suddenly just started getting tons and tons of German spam.

I tried Googling for a way to block mail in a language or from a country, but apparently the technology just isn't there to do so(/s). Getting rid of Russian and German mail would completely fix my spam problem.

Yup, definitely. It's a relatively new thing, and the stuff that's getting through looks more and more obviously like spam

Very weird to see the spam filter be obviously and dramatically worse than it was 10 years ago. Are they about to move to a paid model for Gmail? Hehe

I very much have been. For maybe the past few years. I'm not sure if it's because I've been using mail less and less over time and their algos not keeping up cuz I never read anything, or spam blocking is just getting worse, period..

Yes! I get insurance quote email that is so blatantly obviously spam that it made me think that there is either a bug in the spam filter or it’s something more insidious. It’s been happening for a while and training Gmail to filter it isn’t working.

I was getting multiple emails like this per day a couple of weeks ago: https://i.imgur.com/m8nmpTr.png

But they seem to have stopped... for now. It was quite aggravating.

I got 2 of these today, yet I can’t even send myself email from my own domain through Twilio without google silently dropping it from transit. I would be happy to get into spam, at least that way I could add custom filters.

Meanwhile Google bots ban valid accounts for non existent spam, like mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28628849

This is what decline looks like

+1 I have the same issue, receiving similar emails every day with iOS notification

Best thing you can do is just hit the spam report button and wait. Spammers do occassionally get their hands on clean IPs or networks, and someone has to get the messages in their inbox for the crowdsourcing to work.

Yes, exactly the same type of stuff. And the other day a legitimate email from a company I was interviewing with (from an email address I have had two way communication with) got marked as a promotion.

Something's up here.

I am not in the US. i am getting spam from prominent US senators ("Nancy Pelosi Headquarters

Are you telling me that all those tough screening , bar raiser hiring and jazz can not produce a descent employee to solve this problem at google? I thought best of best of this universe works for FAANG. Amused.

Yep! I receive one from ovoluvil@gmail , He has send to me this file: fastmoneyFVba.htm Wich is some kind of virus. I do not have any idea about the last time I have receive something like that before.

Yes, I noticed the same thing the past few weeks, and it seems increasingly bad. I'm really surprised because 10+ years before this I don't recall even a single spam getting past the filter.

No. Gmail spam filtering seems to work almost perfectly for me, with maybe one false negative a month. I just went into my spam folder to look for false positives, and couldn't find one.

+1. In my case, it's not that many, maybe a few a week but enough for me to notice it. Most of them are offering "Free Online Quote" for car insurance and such.

This was a big problem for me, until one day I sat down and cleaned my inbox. Basically moving the correct things to the correct place and now I don't face this issue.

Yes, all in the last month. I've been using my email address for almost 2 decades, got maybe 3 spam emails in that whole time. The last month - at least 3 got through.

I'm not using gmail, but am seeing the exact same thing in the last 3-4 weeks with my email provider (Hover). Mine are all loan-related. Marking as spam has no effect.

Yes have been for a few years… almost as if it was blessed… been interested in building a filter via the api that actually works as well as the original gmail spam filters

Yes, I am getting lots of those recently. It has some Russian roots, senders names are Cyrillic and sounds Russian. I think someone found a loophole in Gmail antispam.

I've seen a few more recently. Some seem to use a hack of using a List-Id: header, which may reduce the spam score.

I also have to rescue valid List mail from the spam folder though.

Yes, I had about 4 messages in Inbox with CC list and an .html attachment, but they were all complete random letters.

Subject: X 6673 B 11 KZPV 5 V 6 BO 720 XGWH 8

Body: EC 3753 YK 6321 UXNS 487

I have been getting them daily and just got one like you mentioned 13 minutes ago.

Most are German, but now a lot of non-english letter based ones in last few days.

Same, since about two month. The name of my country’s brands, separated with dots or spaces. Extremely easy to detect, so why does it pass…

Yes, and somehow they're also marked as important even though it's from an unknown contact with none of my contacts CC'd.

Yes! I thought it might just be me. I keep clicking the spam button, but there are so many. But I went years with no spam messages.

Yes, email has become useless. I get upset when I receive really important stuff via email because of how easy it is to miss it.

Yes! I don't know if it's related but some emails I've recently sent went to spam in other people's inboxes.

For the past couple of months at least, yeah, i get prob, realistically, at least 3 a day.

I'm guessing i'm part of the new test spam audience.

brutal.

Yep, for the past couple months, I get a few a week that slip in. They all have garbage formatting and are wildly obvious.

Yes, I got an email of this exact type today. Over the last few months my gmail spam in my inbox has doubled or tripled.

Yup. Marked one as spam today and I seem to be getting a few every month, whereas before it was maybe one per year.

Yes, very obvious bitcoin scams with html attachments that try to execute script to redirect you to another webpage

Yes. And i've noticed they have a new trick that allows "images" to be loaded without my accepting.

Yes, I am getting the same kind of emails.

I still have this problem, but I don't know who can help me. Google does not give clear answers to this

Not only am I having more spam in my inbox, in the past month I have had a significant increase in spam.

I have also gotten these in the past week or so, same Cyrillic text, same Elon bitcoin attachments.

I’ve gotten a ton of spam and marking it as spam doesn’t seem to help. Gmail getting less workable

Yes. Some reaching the Primary box.

Yes, very noticeable. For me, it is exclusively @gmail.com addresses that get through.

Yes, this week I received the same kind of emails which bypassed the filter as well.

Yes! Just in the last couple of weeks, just the most bizarre spam getting through.

They're just using plain text a lot & very watered down language.

To filter email with .html or .htm attachement use :

filename:html filename:htm

I am getting AustraIians are making miIIions from Bitcoin daily. Or so.

Yep, got them for a few days last month, then they got caught properly

A lot. Especially American political spam and I'm not from US.

Yes! Thank you!!

The most obvious 2000s era spam is coming straight to my inbox.

Even Gmail spam filtering is one of the best, it has its limit. The solution is to use different email addresses (aliases) to control who can send us emails: if we start to receive spams at one address, we can just disable it.

Yes, looks like Russian text with attachments... About daily.

I wish recruiter emails counted as spam. Honestly don't why they don't. Some can't be bothered to include my name.

No, No one wants to live in Arkansas doing contract to hire for $30/hour working on some windows mess.

This is just junk mail

Yes, I've been getting a bunch for the past week or so.

Yes I get these exact emails, also get added to Google docs

Yes I can like 20 of those per day all to my primary inbox

Google crumbling under its own weight in yet another area.

I have also gotten this emails this last couple of weeks.

Yup, been marking them as SPAM and reporting to SpamCop

Yes. Received one this afternoon, as a matter of fact.

Yes! This has just started in the last week or so..

Yes. I send them to abuse@ every time I get them.

yep. I am starting to get very annoyed with it .

Yep, last 2 weeks about 10-15 emails per day

Yes I get at least one of those every day!

Just got that exact email moments ago.

Yes, getting a lot of these lately

Yes, it's getting more common.

yea spam with content like fsdboijhgghwghQIUXXXQQEWR even in the subject line getting through.

Yes with an attached HTML file.

keep reporting it and maybe they'll catch on lol or they'll read this.

Yes, loads of this exact thing

Yes, I get the same emails

It's still better than Outlook which regularly sends legitimate emails into the spam folder.

Yep same issue here.

Yes loads of it

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes, and I think it's related to an issue from earlier in July where gmail spam got way too strict.

Here's a thread where I walk through our hassle trying to get Gsuite support to try to acknowledge they even consider this an issue, let alone do something about it: https://twitter.com/JustinMcCammon/status/141761476919279206...

tldr; remove all bit.ly links from your emails

Google has massively messed up spam filters and we got confirmation that they are aware of the issue from Gsuite support (although it seemed like Google did not consider it a problem and was just the absolute worst to try to work with via support. Absolutely terrible at every interaction except one rep who had to fight the system to help us investigate).

We use Gsuite at work and ran into issues where in the middle of an email thread, with contacts we'd exchanged dozens of messages over many weeks and even months, suddenly the emails were being sent to our spam folder or worse, rejected entirely (which ends up being a silent failure unless you are really on top of your email logs or you have clients that pick up the phone and say "why haven't you responded to my email?" we had the latter).

We reach out and spent weeks going back and forth daily with Google "support". I'd spend hours on the phone with them going through steps to recreate it and trying to find workarounds. Aside from one good rep who acknowledged many other people were writing in about it at the same time we were it really seemed like Google could not care less.

At one point I got so desperate I searched on twitter to find other people complaining about things. I found a person who was willing to help me - she was on the other side of things - someone NOT using gmail trying to send emails to gmail users and getting the rejection bouncebacks all of a sudden. She helped me figure out some of the root causes. Turns out Google decided that all bit.ly links were bad and if one appeared in your email it was either rejected or sent to spam (we couldn't figure out why one or the other). With her help we figured out clear steps to reproduce the issue and I did so on emails I controlled to send all the email headers and such to Google thinking they would realize the obvious issue.

Turns out we had bit.ly links in our own company email signature and so what was happening is when a client would reply to our email and it would include our own signature in it then google would flag that email as bad.

In addition there were some cases where links to google docs or youtube (the irony!) were also getting flagged.

The only thing we did that worked was to set up custom exception rules in gsuite to always allow emails through that contained bit.ly links or gdoc links as well as turn off ALL spam filtering. Naturally we all got lots more spam but we also could get regular emails again, which was much appreciated.

I had a phone convo with someone at bit.ly since I figured they might like to know and maybe could apply some pressure to google but after running it up the ladder there they ghosted me.

Seen it too.

It must be all the pesky Russian disinformation that's everywhere, right? Surely google wouldn't tweak an algorithm to further anyone's narrative?