Warning: this is sort of a personal pet peeve of late, so if you only care about reading general tech news, you might wanna skip this one.
I’ve been a happy Gmail user for years, and never had any complaints about its ability to separate legitimate emails from spam. Nevertheless, I’ve made a habit out of regularly checking my spam folder out of fear of missing important emails, even though I used to have to recover only one or maybe two messages per month. Now I’m glad I made a habit out of doing that.
Since about a week and a half ago, I’ve noticed that legitimate emails are being marked as spam at increasing rates, to the degree where I have to check my spam folder as often as my regular inbox in order not to miss breaking news from sources or via our contact page, or even emails from TechCrunch colleagues.
As you can tell from the screenshot above (click through for a bigger version of that image), most of the emails in my spam folder this morning are messages I want to read or scan at least. Most of them do not contain more links than emails that hit my inbox, some come from people who I’ve been receiving emails from for years, and one was event sent by my new TC colleague Evelyn Rusli … from her Gmail account. I’ll save you the trouble of trying to count: 6 out of 31 emails in that screenshot were actually spam, the rest were legitimate messages.
Needless to say, if you work for a blog like the one you’re reading now, this is really bad.
I’ve asked my Twitter followers if they are Gmail users and have also noticed this trend, and from what I can gather I’m far from alone in this (see responses here, here and here), although some say this started occurring for them months and not weeks ago – and some haven’t noticed anything strange whatsoever.
Either way, I contacted Google about the problem too, and a company spokesperson said:
“We are always making adjustments to help improve the spam detection in Gmail. Our spam-fighting abilities are a large part of the reason why many users choose to use Gmail. We make best efforts to only flag spam email, but users can also help us learn by clicking the “Report spam” and “Not spam” buttons.”
From what I understand, Google’s internal statistics do not suggest that there’s an increase in legitimate emails being filtered out, nor is there any indication of an increase in false positives (which I don’t have a problem with). Basically, they seem to suggest it’s not a general issue and that some emails are simply falling through the cracks in my case.
Frankly, I doubt it, based on my conversations about this on Twitter and the fact that the issue popped up one bad day and hasn’t gone away since. The main problem is that there’s no way for me to manipulate the automated filter – Google simply suggests creating filters per message / contact or to constantly add people to my Contacts list, which is virtually impossible at this scale.
So I guess I’m stuck with checking two folders instead of one until Google makes another adjustment in my favor.
Has the spam filter being overactive for your Gmail account as well of late?
I haven’t had any issues with false positives in quite some time. In fact the opposite is more the case with me? I receive around 60 legitimate emails a day.
I don’t have an issue with false positives either, rather with false negatives.
Robin, your blurring of the subject lines and contents of emails in your screenshot is insufficient, plenty of the text is clearly visible.
That’s fine, no trade secrets in there :)
just checked the spam folder and I am glad I did. Thanks (:
It really depends on how you have used, your gmail account. I had a gmail account last year, untouched— Meaning I haven’t used it for any registration on those sites, including those x-rated ones.. I checked it last week. And I got 20 messages, which all came from GMAIL..
So my point here is, you can never be spammed, if you don’t use your email to collaborate with spam (I know this is hard, because sometimes, even forums sell your email account to spam it)
Anyway, try to use a different email account (personal) if that’s the case, and leave a dirty email account, for those ’smutty things’ you like.
Gmail is great, the only problems I have with it, is some downtime issues, while I’m on crunchtime sending emails
Gmail has a very convenient feature that allows you to figure out where your spam is originating from.
The problem: while what you say is true: if you don’t let your email id out, it won’t get to spammers. The downside is that sometimes a legitimate company will have a breakin or a leak in which your email address is given to a spammer and then passed around.
The solution is the feature I mentioned: gmail allows you to annotate your email address as you give it out. For instance, when I signed up for the Seesmic mailing list, I signed up with my.email+seesmic@gmail.com. Seesmic contracted AWeber to do their email campaign, which is all well and good, except that in the coming months, AWeber would experience a security breach, releasing my.email+seesmic@gmail.com to the spammers. I did nothing wrong in trusting my email to Seesmic, and my email address still got to spammers. The trick here is, however, I was able to tell that my spam was coming from my +seesmic annotation due to the sent field in the spam. Using Gmail filters, I blocked all incoming email from anyone sending to:my.email+seesmic@gmail.com, and went and resigned up for Seesmic’s email list with a new annotation my.email+seesmic2@gmail.com. The spam ceased entirely and immediately after placing the filter in effect. As a result, I get less than 1 spam message in my box per week with no special setup on my part.
More info on the AWeber breakin here: (it was my tweet being referenced in the letter from seesmic) http://bluepojo.com/post/295636016/seesmics-official-response
Just searched through 5 pages of Spam: Not a single false positive.
False negatives arrive at the rate of 1/month roughly.
My problem is totally the opposite. I usually end up with more spam my inbox that legitimate mail.
I’ve begging them to turn up the filtering a notch. Its to the point where I’ve considered a different email provider.
Yep same here. From 100 mails, 85 mails are spam and in the inbox. I now forward it to Hotmail and fetch it back… SAD… but works like a charm.
I just checked too. Way too many legitimate emails marked as spam. How discouraging, since I’m the guy that tells everyone to use gmail. I NEVER check SPAM folder, because I have never had this kind of problem. SOmething is definitely wrong.
Yes Robin. Just because your a blogger Google should adjust their filters JUST FOR YOU. Your the only important one with your internet megaphone.
Should you not be writing some drivel about the ipad or iphone os 4.0? Or engaging in some other important narcissistic behavior?
Wow, trolls these days are losing all their subtlety. Maybe the reason he’s suggesting Gmail adjust their filters is because a lot of people have been reporting this? Try checking the thread actually, lots of people are finding e-mails they’re glad they caught.
MG should never go on vacation.
I agree :)
I was wondering where he was…
Figures that he planned his vacation around the iPad release. What a dork.
Gmail marks emails to me from Adwords and Adsense as spam
never had similar problems…
I’ve only ever had one or two falsely get labelled as spam each month and nothing has changed from what I can tell.
I noticed a few messages falsely flagged as spam over the past 1-2 weeks. Not many, and probbaly about 1-2% of the total spam messages, so it’s still a pretty reasonable spam filter, but I have to admit I did slip into a period of not checking it as closely as possible, so I’m going to be more careful in future!
Me too, lots of mails are getting flagged as spams.
Just click “Not Spam”. Is that so hard ?
Nope, not hard. Just tedious and time-consuming if you have to weed through dozens of emails every few hours to determine which are effectively spam.
I think you only need to mark “not spam” your emails for a couple of days, then Gmail will learn that that kind of email must not be considered spam for you.
Of course, if you’ve been marking “not spam” your email lately, that button is not meant to let gmail learn from its mistakes ;)
Again, everyting worked fine for the past 4 years.
A pain when you have to do it for the same set of emails frequently.
Yeah, I’m suddenly seeing a lot of non-spam messages in my spam folder. from the look of it it started early Tuesday morning PDT.
Haven’t noticed any problems on my end.
I’ve had no problems whatsoever, and haven’t noticed any increase in false positives. Still works great (and I get about 250-300 messages per day on average)
No false positives here.
Your spam box gets more interesting with photoshop’s ’sharpen’ filter:
“Twitter gets a like button”, “facebook twitter squabble about facebook twitter app”, “google checkout broken for 2 days”, “google street view in 3d”
The point being?
this is sort of a personal pet peeve of late, so if you only care about reading general comments, you might wanna skip this comment.
+100
LOL
577 messages in spam folder.
577 of them spam.
So I’m pretty happy with that.
Haven’t noticed this, but haven’t been looking at spam at all.
Hmm this does seem to be a problem. Looks like maybe Gmail thinks deleted = spam. Amusingly some of my Google Alerts notifications have been marked as spam!
Actually I was stunned when I first registered a gmail account – The first 100 or so mails I received were spam, without even registering to any newsletters etc.
I remember saving couple of legit mails from my spam folder, but it’s not my habit to check that folder.
Thanks for the heads up.
I just checked, and it had marked several Google alerts as spam.
Really Gmail? Your own emails?
Notice that most of the newsletter are getting flagged as spam nowadays.
I am having the same problem here.
http://bit.ly/gmlftw
I clicked on a setting few months ago and I do not see spam folder now, as I read the article I called it bakc (in:spam in the search box) and discovered a notification from my hosting provider that my hositng plan is about to expire – which was nasty :( SO, yes I am affected too.
@Martin: click the “4 more” drop-down and you will see it. It took me a long time to find my missing folders, too.
Just checked my spam folder:
2 mails from Tapulous got caught and marked as spam, that’s all. And those 2 mails could be considered to be spam as well because they are just ads.
Forgot to add that the total count is at 290 spam mails. So I have a grand total of less than 0,7% false positives. I find that very acceptable.
To circumvent Gmail’s over-smart spam detector algorithm, you can create a filter setting up a rule that a message sent to you (the one containing your email address in the To field) should not be sent to the Spam folder.
But isn’t that opening the door for spam to flood your inbox?
The Google Ad at the top is a perfect match for the context.
I have two different domains on hosted Gmail and am not having this issue. I HAVE had this caused in the past by incorrectly marking a couple of emails as spam (when the Report Spam button was too close to the Delete button). Frequently when you mark one email from a domain as spam, it will blacklist the entire domain. Not a problem right now though.
Aye – I’ve just checked the spam folder and, as others have already commented, Google Alerts are being marked as spam – wonder if it’s relevant that they’re “vanity” alerts (ie, my name)?
Also have one other sender (England & Wales Cricket Board) who is regularly dumped in the spam folder automatically despite being marked several times as “not spam” – email address is constant. I have now however added them to my Contacts as suggested.
Thanks for the heads-up Robin.
I used to mark some of my mails as spam, but still in my inbox from the next day…
Yeah. I have been having this feeling for quite some time now. I have to constantly check the spam folder and find my important emailes there. Like my flights reservations and so.
But it is also true that by the same time I started to receive even more spam…
I have had quite a few since about a month ago
You can try http://myattn.com (Attention Auction) where people pay you for reading messages. If the message is not spam you can RETURN MONEY to the sender. But if it’s a spam you can get the money or donate it for charity. It is a much better filter.
All good communications stay absolutely free.
spammer!